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In The Freudian Moment Christopher Bollas continues his ongoing inquiry into the analytic process and the nature of analytic technique. He has always been a careful and sensitive reader of Freud, as alert to his shortcomings as to his genius. In this book he locates the central and fundamental tenet of Freud's work in the means by which the analyst enables the patient's process of free association. He is at pains to emphasize this because he perceives that it is becoming marginalized in contemporary analytic discourse. If we forgo due attention to it, then, he believes, we have strayed a long way from the classical method that Freud took care to outline. To my mind, this is a very worthwhile thesis, and anything that encourages clinicians to read, or reread, Freud is good news.
The book is made up of five chapters. The first two consist of interviews with Christopher Bollas carried out by Vincenzo Bonaminio, an Italian training analyst, who also writes the introduction. Chapter 3 is a reprint of a paper published in the Psychoanalytic Review in 2006. Chapter 4 ‘What is Theory?’ is a talk given by Bollas at the International Federation of Psychoanalytic Education's (IFPE) Annual Conference in 2006. Chapter 5 is