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Christopher Bollas's latest book, Meaning and Melancholia: Life in the Age of Bewilderment, is a slim volume but its 15, thrifty chapters pack quite a punch. Many of the chapters originally took shape as guest lectures given in the USA, Europe and Asia between 2011 and 2017. As the subtitle suggests, they are an attempt to wrestle with the state we are in, socially, politically and culturally, following the rise of Trump and post-Brexit in the UK.
The book's epigraph, a quotation from Nietzsche, runs: ‘The story I have to tell is the history of the next two centuries … For a long time now our civilization has been driving, with a tortured intensity growing from decade to decade, as if towards a catastrophe … like a mighty river desiring the end of its journey, without pausing to reflect, indeed fearful of reflection … Where we live, soon nobody will be able to exist’.
Bollas has heard Nietzsche's gong of Armageddon and now, more than a century on, he feels compelled to explain its timbre, pitch and volume. He does so with recourse to beloved tenets of psychoanalysis. These are theories which account for