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This slim volume, with no index or bibliography, includes three lectures Christopher Bollas delivered to The Chicago Workshop (1991-2007) and the Arild Conference (1983-2010), followed by twelve pages of his answers to questions posed by Sacha Bollas (PsyD). The format of a collection of essays is familiar from Bollas' previous books, as is his focus on character. He encourages psychoanalysts to think about character structure since “the advantage of any character structure is that its repetition makes the person's distress findable” (p. xiii).
Bollas has his own somewhat idiosyncratic concept of character. Impressed by his infant son's evident way of being in the world, Bollas posits, “I believe each of us at birth is equipped with a unique idiom of psychic organization that constitutes the core of our self” (Bollas, 1992, p. 51). This “unique idiom” represents something like a fingerprint. The idiom is expressed via character types as an individual's character interacts with and is influenced by the “unconscious relational intelligence in the family's way of being” (Bollas, 1992, p. 51). In other references Bollas equates character with Winnicott's true self, a notion Bollas defines as “a wordless, imageless solitude” the analyst can come to know (Bollas, 1989, p. 21). The true self is what permits an individual to avoid fate and instead find their own destiny. Sara Nettleton sums up Bollas' concept of character as “the form in which we unconsciously communicate with, and are received by another person” (Nettleton, 2017, p. 41).
With these shifting contours, character might end up a frustrating concept. The essays, however, are insightful and, to use one of his favorite words, evocative. Bollas richly contrasts different forms of unconscious communication, drawing on a wide range of literature and psychoanalytic theorists. These citations illustrate his three character-types, Narcissist, Borderline and Manic Depressive, a shorter roster than Freud's erotic, narcissi