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This short book is intended to be both an introduction and an invitation to the work of Christopher Bollas, and in those tasks it succeeds quite nicely. In a series of brief, clearly written chapters, Sarah Nettleton outlines some of Bollas's key concepts and, if she raises more questions than she answers, that serves mainly to entice the reader to turn to Bollas's work itself, for a deeper immersion in the thought of this interesting, if ultimately somewhat unsatisfying, analytic thinker.
Bollas, perhaps less well-known in the United States than elsewhere, is an American-born psychoanalyst, now British-based, whose writings have focused on preoedipal, often preverbal, experiences, and how they shape adult life, including the therapeutic experience. He completed a Ph.D. in English literature in the U.S., at SUNY-Buffalo, and took his psychoanalytic training in the U.K. He has published widely, developing his own somewhat idiosyncratic language for discussing very early experiences and their traces in adult life, stemming perhaps from his own early experiences working with autistic and schizophrenic patients, including children.
Each concise chapter (the book itself is short, a mere ninety-six pages of text) begins with references to a few key papers and the major concepts to be discussed in the chapter. Nettleton begins with “psychic genera,” which she describes as “matrices or clusters of internal intensity that are created when related ideas, images, and feelings are attracted together with a ‘collecting psychic gravity’” (p. 15). Characteristic of Bollas, he uses the term genera in an idiosyncratic way, connecting both the the sense of “generative” and the sense of “genus,” or descriptive category. A question that runs through my reading of Nettleton, and of Bollas himself,