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.
In his latest book, Three Characters, Christopher Bollas animates a trifecta of psychoanalytic characters: the Narcissist, the Borderline and the Manic Depressive. The essays are derived from lectures by Bollas for a series of seminars in Chicago and Sweden spanning nearly thirty years. A unique reading experience in clinical writing, the book illuminates the psychic reality of character pathology through the convention of the character sketch.
Implementing an exercise from his literary studies, the author projects himself into each character type so that we may “get into the minds” of these personalities and appreciate the intelligence of their defensive structures. In doing so he orients the reader toward the transient depersonalization one may have while reading a work of literature or while listening to an analysand if we are successful enough in putting our objectifying impulses aside. In some psychoanalytic corners, these are entities one may hear described in terms of identifiable characteristics, types of cognition, modes of functioning and so on (consider Shapiro’s Neurotic Styles as an ego-psychological point of contrast). Here Bollas renders the “psychodynamic and object-relational logic” of character pathology in a spacious, gestural manner that at times called to mind humoral cosmology or Dürer engravings: theories of personality types that pre-date rationalist science.
In these pages, one can feel how Bollas has spent decades venturing to enter states of deep identification with his analysands. Drawing from his own idiomatic repository of clinical
encounters, he selects paradigms of being and relating that constellate into three figurative Gestalts. Less a “type of patient”, these characters resemble literary archetypes for their universal resonance and appear as mythical beings for their fantastical status and infinite variation. As the author cautions, no two narcissists, borderlines or manic depressives are alike. Yet as clinicians, we are often ha