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What kind of global selves are we becoming? This is the central question fervently posed by Christopher Bollas in his slim yet sweeping new book. Advances in industry and technology over the last two centuries have not only changed our modes of being in the world but also our forms of thought, degrading them in ways that propel our species toward extinction. We are in a psychosocial crisis, Bollas declares, one that demands prompt understanding of political psychology and the application of psychodynamics to large groups and nations.
The urgent societal need for psychoanalytic awareness exists alongside what Bollas describes as a prevalent post-millennial anxiety - “psychophobia” - the cultural fear and hatred of self-reflection, the dread of exploring inner life (p. 128). The cultural corollaries to this psychic tendency are cognitive behavioral therapies, the widespread dependence on prescription drugs, and evidence-based health care systems. Result-oriented attitudes have replaced a more profound self-inquiry. How did we learn to recoil from our inner worlds? We are afraid of looking inside ourselves due to trepidation of what we will find: recognition of our collective capacity for destruction.
With reference to modern writers including Conrad, Hemmingway and Woolf, Bollas identifies historical patterns of collective thought that began to emerge with 19th century industrialization, what he calls “frames of mind” that become structuralized within a shared unconscious (p. xxi). For instance, modern revolutions of industry and military might created a manic mindset that in the 1900s intoxicated Europe and America with grandiosity and fuelled “the trickle-down hubris of rampant colonialism and imperialism” (p. 5). Bollas reminds us that every diagnostic category reflects the dominant mentalities of its era. In the late 20th century, the borderline diagnosis was not only a model for a certain personality, but also a psychodynamic lens for understanding social groups an