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The best lack all conviction, and the worst keep sharpening their claws.
Like the “hook” on a good tune, a written phrase can grab our attention. Christopher Bollas is a master at this, but his creative wordplay deals with a sombre topic. This book is an urgent and insightful plea to the analytic world to move beyond our individual consulting room framework. To state his case, he applies a number of basic psychoanalytic tenets to understand current social, cultural, and political trends, but warns that our greatest challenge is that “we are hampered … by 50 years of psychophobia: a hatred of looking into the mind for fear of what we shall find” (p. xiii).
He weaves together three strands of thought: a brief historical overview of the past 200 years to discern the cumulative traumatic factors in the individual and group psychology of Western culture; an examination of the unconscious defensive patterns that have emerged in response to these