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In recent years Christopher Bollas, one of our most creative and influential theorists, has turned his attention to the most severe cases. In Catch Them Before They Fall: The Psychoanalysis of Breakdown (2013), he described the treatment he offers analysands in crisis, working with them twice a day, seven days a week, or eight or nine hours a day, several days in a row. He argued that such interventions reduce the risk of the breakdown becoming “structuralized” within the patient’s personality. In When the Sun Bursts: The Enigma of Schizophrenia (2015), he described his work with schizophrenic patients over the years. Here, too, he made the case for the importance of interventions well beyond the classical frame, though not without classical precedents. “If intensive psychotherapy is provided in the first weeks of a
person’s schizophrenic onset,” he writes, “there is a good chance that clinicians will see transformations back to non-psychotic functioning” (9).
In Meaning and Melancholia, Bollas now turns his attention to one case in which it may well be too late to halt, let alone reverse, the terrifying descent into madness: the modern world. Like the treatments he describes in Catch Them Before They Fall or When the Sun Bursts, the book is brief, intense, and difficult to classify. In its scope, format, and urgency, it most obviously invites comparison to Civilization and Its Discontents, but Bollas’s book is written in an idiom that is very much his own. Indeed, even though Bollas only refers to Civilization and Its Discontents once, the books deserve to be read, or re-read, together. The continuities and discontinuities between the two have much to tell us about how psychoanalysis has changed over the 90 years separating them.
Bollas sets out his book’s objectives first in a preface, then in a prologue. The preface opens by invoking the election of Donald Trump, the referendum on Brexit, the resurgence of populist and nationalist movements across Europe, and ri