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It is easy to forget that, as with every human experience, listening has a history. In fact, we may already be in the process of forgetting that psychoanalysis announced and inaugurated a new way of overhearing ourselves. The reach for meaning in the analytic encounter is marked by a careful listening for what it is, exactly, one remembers in harking back. Although the odds are stacked against this task in a culture of instrumental values, analysts continue to set store by attention as a creative act. Foremost among the latter, Paula Heimann revitalised the history of analytic listening in the early 1950s by asking the question ‘who is speaking?’. Confirming the profoundly interactive nature of the analytic experience, she asked two further questions: ‘to whom is the patient speaking?’ and ‘what is the patient talking about and why now?’. At a fundamental level, Christopher Bollas has spent the last 30 years or so asking the same questions, and with the publication of The Christopher Bollas Reader it seems like an opportune moment to reflect on his efforts.
The Reader amounts to a substantial retrospective, including a selection of fourteen essays dating from the 1970s as well as two previously unpublished essays. This makes it an important publication in its own right as well as a useful primer. What can readers expect from the choice of papers? Arranged more or less in chronological order, the essays are drawn mainly from Bollas's first four books with an additional handful of examples selected from The Mystery of Things , The Freudian Moment and The Evocative Object World . In themselves these later papers hardly convey the far-reaching and radical implications of Bollas's more