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.
As it approaches both its second century and a new millennium, psychoanalysis appears to be in the throes of a sea-change. Under the shaping influences of object-relations theories, developmental research (Emde, 1990) and newer perspectives in the philosophy of science, the psychoanalyst is, more and more, being seen not as an objective 'neutral' observer but as an engaged participant in the analytic dialogue, and his own affective responses and associations, as much as those of the analysand, are seen as the essential 'material' for the analytic work. Long the point of view of the British 'Independent' group, this approach has become increasingly influential in American psychoanalysis as well, exemplified by the writings of Schwaber, Renik, Jacobs, Stolorow and others.
Christopher Bollas has been a particularly articulate and influential spokesman for this 'new wave' in psychoanalytic thought. In earlier work, he forcefully addressed the importance of what he called the 'unthought known'—i.e. the intenalised preverbal interactions with care-givers, always unconsciously active but inaccessible to waking consciousness—capable of being experientially inferred by a receptive analyst in the course of the analytic process. As intellectual heir to Donald Winnicott, he is also concerned to show the powerful impact of these pre-oedipal, precognitive experiences on a variety of cultural formations that Winnicott would have categorised as 'transitional phenomena'.
Particularly in the first half of the book, Bollas seeks to explore the ways in which we choose the 'objects'—both human and inanimate—that populate our lives and, as he puts it, the ways in which they 'choose' and 'use' us (in this effort he is, of course, pursuing a trail blazed by Winnicott [1969]