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The brightly colored cover of this book and its diminutive square shape signal to the reader that this will not be your usual psychoanalytic treatise. But what exactly is it? A new genre perhaps? An absurdist series of conversations in the tradition of Ionesco or Beckett? And do you need to have a solid knowledge of Bollas's psychoanalytic theory to penetrate these brief vignettes, whose speakers are never named or identified, and whose relationship to each other is never clear? Would I have worked so hard to try to understand this book if I were not reviewing it?
There are 23 short, enigmatic “conversations” in this book and it is not until the end of the book that the reader learns more about how Bollas came to write it. Perhaps he worried that if the reader knew more about what events he was grappling with, the reader would try to interpret it through that lens and would not wrestle with the vignettes on their own terms.
I recently visited the Magritte Museum in Brussels where I learned that the artist never created the titles for his paintings, leaving that to his friends to do or simply leaving them “Untitled,” because he feared that the viewer would try to diminish the experience of seeing the painting by trying to make it “fit” with the title. Thus, I seem to be placing my experience of reading this book into that tradition of artists and playwrights who were responding to the changes in Europe wrought by the two World Wars. And as the conversations unfold, Bollas's dismay, despair, and rage about the current state of the world become vivid, within the context of these seemingly nebulous conversations between strangers, or within himself.
Initially, the currency of these imaginary dialogues seems to take place in shops, reflecting obsessional cravings for objects one can buy. By not naming the speakers, Bollas has created characters who are faceless, alienated, and disoriented. How can they live in this world of rapacious global consumerism? Can they be part of