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The Metapsychology of Christopher Bollas: An Introduction is written by Sarah Nettleton, the interpretative accompanist to Bollas, the celebrated soloist. Bollas has written 13 books (the latest, Meaning and Melancholia, published in March ). He was awarded the Hans Loewald Award in 2006 for outstanding contributions to psychoanalysis. At the same time, neither his name nor his books have been mentioned in my or colleagues’ trainings. I first knew of his work, as I imagine many others have, via attending Sarah Nettleton's ‘Seminars on Christopher Bollas’, which she's offered around the world. Sarah Nettleton is a musician who subsequently trained as a psychoanalyst. In her first profession she worked as a piano accompanist. In a BPF ‘Audience with Authors’ in 2017 she said that the role of accompanist is often misunderstood. If the accompanist sees her role as following the soloist, she is always behind. Rather the accompanist has to be in harmony with the soloist, working in parallel. As she does with Bollas.
Sarah Nettleton, who worked with Bollas for many years as his editor, wrote this book without Bollas’ knowledge. She then sent the manuscript to him, uncertain of his reaction. In the event he was ‘bouleverse’, an untranslatable sensation, of which the closest English words are, ‘bowled over’, ‘flabbergasted’. He said she'd made connections he'd never seen. She'd given his way of understanding the mind an overall coherence which, again, he'd not recognized. In effect, his metapsychology. Metapsychology, a term coined by Freud, aims to bring together ‘“the fundamental concepts and principles” that underpin a theoretical model of the mind’ (p. 93). This is what Nettleton does with the works of Bollas.
In her Introduction, Nettleton writes that Bollas’ ‘picture of the mind was present, in essence, from the beginning of his writing. However, his overall model of the mind does not appear as a whole in any one place. The present book is an attempt to remedy this situa