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Cracking Up, published in 1995, is the fourth in Christopher Bollas's series of rich and penetrating books, which has since continued with the addition of two more recent volumes, The Mystery of Things (1999) and Hysteria (2000).
As an enthusiastic reader of the author's original treatment of the clinical phenomena he explores, embodied in a unique and personal style that eschews all the conventions of psychoanalytic writing, and partly because of his two-year periodicity of publication, I was expecting this book to be a further development of what I saw as a unitary—albeit internally linked—trilogy comprising The Shadow of the Object (1987), Forces of Destiny (1989) and Being a Character (1992).
However, when I saw what intense concentration was called for in the (in fact highly rewarding) reading and re-reading of Cracking Up owing to its complex and closely argued subject-matter, I realised that this volume constitutes not only a further step in the evolution of Bollas's thought but also a qualitative leap in his theoretical and conceptual progression.
This change of level proves to be determined by the author's chosen theme, which is fundamental to psychoanalysis—namely, as he puts it,
the place of unconscious work in the psychic context of self experience, a venture I began on Being a Character, where I argued that Freud's vision of the total dream process is a model of all unconscious experiencing. That process, which starts with a sequence of psychically intense experiences during the day, continues with the dream event, followed by cracking up the dream contents through free associations (p. 3).
Bollas had, in fact, already foreshadowed this line of thought—one might almost say programmatically—in a paper dating from the same period1 and now included in his more recent The Mystery of Things. Here he maintained that it
is no accident that Freud took the dream as the cornerstone of psychoanalysis, where the person
‘Origins of the therapeutic alliance’, presented at t
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‘Origins of the therapeutic alliance’, presented at t