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Words such as deterministic, positivist, scientific have been used to describe Freud's approach to his work. Nineteenth-century science was in search of ‘objective truth’. It took physicists like Planck, Einstein, Heisenberg and Bohr to challenge this view. In this wonderfully allusive, beautifully written book by Bollas, it is Freud's method, the method of free association, that has captivated him. But, in contrast to earlier views of Freud's work, this method, according to Bollas, undermines the entire structure of Western epistemology.
By asking the patient to free associate, Bollas says that Freud ‘released us all to be continuously mysterious to ourselves and to others’ (p. 1). Why mystery, what does Bollas mean? He sees the method as breaking open certainties, not only the pathological certainties of patients, but psychoanalytic certainties as well. There are other aspects to mystery, mental illness, why this dilemma and not that. And, more than that, the psychoanalytic exploration itself is full of mystery. Interestingly, he says he writes for the lay reader as well as psychoanalysts because ‘what we discover in this work should be of much wider interest’ (p. 3). How paradoxical to extend the audience, in the context of what could be seen as the mystifying aspects of