Sickness in the Body Politic: Christopher Bollas and the Deformation of Political Spaces and Subjects

Any society in which the government, the press and the leaders of opinion are disseminating little but skepticism, trickery and submissiveness is a society that is dying; it is only moralizing in order to dissimulate its decay. (Mounier, 1952, p. 53)

In his discussion about transformational objects/processes, Christopher Bollas (1987), almost in passing, refers to extremist political leaders who possess “a collective certainty that their revolutionary ideology will effect a total environmental transformation” (p. 27). This certainty he argues bears a “trace” of early infant organizations of experience that gives rise to the revolutionary's desire for a total transformation. This trace is inextricably part of a basic fault the revolutionary is unconsciously trying to repair. This brief reference to extremist revolutionaries suggests that Bollas considers transformation objects to be applicable to political realities, though in this case the collective certainty of revolutionaries—which Adam Phillips (1993, p. 63) would deem to be a perversion—signifies a negative transformational object/process, wherein the political subjectivity of the self-certain revolutionary is partially deformed. While Bollas is more concerned with demonstrating the clinical and developmental utility of this concept, his passing remark regarding political revolutionaries suggests that transformational objects/processes are applicable to political realities.

The leap from parent-infant relations and organizations of experience to the political realm is considerable, given the extensive psychosocial developmental achievements that take place between infancy and adulthood, as well as the complex array of cultural, economic, and political variables persons encounter as children and adults. The leap raises numerous questions such as if there are traces of early infancy's pre-representational experiences in adult activities, how influential or significant are they? To what degree, in other words, is th