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In a Preface to the second of these two volumes of his notebooks spanning from 1974 to 2024, Christopher Bollas informs us that the task of transcribing them from his “almost unreadable” (II, viii) handwriting lasted 10 years.
It’s tempting to ask why he didn’t leave the task to some hapless archivist of the future and save himself the bother – given the dizzyingly expansive range of his work as evident in these volumes, it’s not as though he didn’t have other things to do. Bollas explains his reluctance on this score as rooted primarily in the anxiety that a posthumous archive might enable the identification of some of his patients.
In his 1995 volume The New Informants, co-authored with David Sundelson, Bollas set out a polemical and explicitly psychoanalytic case for the vigilant defence of clinical confidentiality. Future scholars will be grateful to his dedication to this essential principle for saving them the task of travel to an airless basement in London or Austin to study the intricacies and flows of his thought’s evolution. There can be very few readily available textual resources that show us so vividly and in such granular detail how a major body of thinking comes into being.
Streams of Consciousness does indeed read rather like an archive between covers. Unlike a journal, it doesn’t convey the sense of an unfolding through time – the progress of clinical cases, developments in the daily life of the analyst or in the world beyond; it is only in recent years, during which he has been consulting figures in the international community “increasingly alarmed by geopolitical events” (II, viii), that news from the external world becomes the central theme of the notebooks.
Entries from the first volume, running between 1974 and 1991, read with remarkable freshness and relevancy. To witness Bollas experiment with and refine his ideas as they emerge – stretching a metapsychological concept in one direction then another, trying out new clinical formulations, exploring