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In The Mystery of Things, Christopher Bollas continues his engagement with what it means to be a person and what psychoanalysis has to say about such a subject - in both senses of the word. He takes as his motif a quote from King Lear:
… so we'll live,
and pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues
Talk of court news; and we'll talk with them too -
Who loses and who wins, who's in, who's out -
And take upon's the mystery of things
As if we were God's spies …
He is exploring the irreducible ground of psychoanalysis, the one thing which in his view makes psychoanalysis unique as an epistemological practice in western culture: free association. It is free association which distinguishes psychoanalysis from any other forms of investigation into the mind, personality, knowledge or selfhood. Only through free association are we able to experience the radical difference between our self and our mind, between what we think and what we are able to put into words