Christopher Bollas is an exciting, challenging writer. He can also be exasperating, leaving his reader to struggle through dense verbal thickets or, as they begin to grapple with an idea, insufficiently elaborated, the author chimerically darts off to a different idea, returning to his original theme in later paragraphs or papers. Clinical examples that illustrate theories are often, frustratingly, presented in separate papers. The reader is required to provide much of the integration for themselves. This gripe aside, I found this series of papers provocative and refreshing.

Bollas strongly challenges the certainty of disparate analytic groups, Lacanian, Kohutian, Kleinian, object relations, ego-psychologists, who while usefully focusing in on one area, promote their ‘part object theory as a whole object realisation’ (p. 62). He argues that Freud in his