You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
After three consecutive novels about an old analyst struggling with life, work, and death—Dark at the end of the tunnel (2004), I have heard the mermaids singing (2005), and Mayhem (2006)—we now have another nonfictional work by Christopher Bollas.
In two vivid interviews conducted by Vincenzo Bonaminio, training and supervising analyst of the Italian Psychoanalytic Society in Rome, Bollas explains his most recent considerations on unconscious thinking, psychic transformations, and the different ways of articulation of the unconscious. The interviews also show the longlasting, fruitfully influencing relationship between Bollas and Italian psychoanalysis: for 30 years, he has been giving lectures and workshops in Italy, and, as Bonaminio points out, all his books have been translated into Italian.
The first interview, on “Psychic transformation,” starts with Bollas's explanation of his term “Freudian moment”: Freud's dream-work theory as discovery of man's relationship to his creative unconsciousness, and the beginning of psychoanalysis as transformative moment in Western culture. Bollas declares for himself the necessity of a pluralist view instead of belonging just to one psychoanalytic school, a position he calls “totalitarian.”
Seeing theory as a special way of perception, he argues that, to say one must become a Lacanian or Kleinian, excluding other theories “is as absurd as saying that one must become an advocate of the ear, or an eye-guy, or a touch person, or a sniffer” (p. 5). To remain in one school risks the “scotomatic effect of a canalized vision.” This canalized vision on the patient makes the analyst look for and interpret what he has been taught to see; it hinders the development of a state in which the analyst can freely listen to the free-talking patient. Bollas reminds us that Bion's demand to listen without memory or desire is in fact Freudian, following his advice in the “Two encyclopaedia articles” (1923, p. 239) for the analyst “to surrender himse