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In his new book, Cracking Up, Christopher Bollas chooses to give a central position to the work, not of unconscious processes as they manifest themselves in consciousness (and, above all, for the psychoanalyst, all that that entails), but rather to the presence and the workings of unconscious processes as valid and validifying expressions of the self. This validity of the unconscious at work is in relation to others, as well as within the self, in the forms of expression constituting imagining, dreaming, playing, phantasising, but without the extension or elaboration derived from analysis and, as it were, without its necessary application.
As his main hypothesis he asserts that the capacity for and the presence of ‘the freely moving work of the unconscious’, something that is potentially in all of us, rests upon the particular coming together of two of the elements that Freud described in his description of the dream process: the ‘psychically intense’ experiences that constitute the dream ‘event’ and the capacity to ‘crack’ these up through free association. Taking these two elements, Bollas suggests that as human beings we are able to find differing levels of what he calls ‘unconscious freedom’ through ‘the necessary opposition between the part of us that finds truth by uniting disparate ideas (i.e. “condensation”) and the part of us that finds the truth in breaking up those unities’.
Thus, the hypothesis upon which he focuses this new study or set of essays is the capacity of the mind to bring together freely and to take apart freely in a continuum and in a continuing process, a curative and enriching feature in all minds, though not all minds are able to deploy it. Bollas goes on to give variations upon, discourses upon, elaborations upon this central tenet, taken originally from Freud and the riches of the unconscious in the act of dreaming. This text, then, is about the process of unconsciousness per se, as defined in this way, (‘coming together/breaking apart’)