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Christopher Bollas is most widely known for his psychoanalytic writings which include well over a dozen books. About ten years ago, a significant shift occurred in Bollas' writing with the publication of three novels and a volume of plays. His newest book, China on the Mind, brings together the psychoanalytic and the literary in an exploration of Eastern and Western modes of thought in relation to contemporary psychoanalytic theory. To understand the ease with which Bollas moves between the literary and the psychoanalytic, one needs only to consider his educational background.
As an undergraduate, Bollas studied intellectual history with Carl Schorske and psychoanalytic critical theory with Frederick Crews at the University of California, Berkeley. Later he completed his Ph.D. at the State University of New York at Buffalo where he studied philosophy, literature and psychoanalysis with Michel Foucault, René Girard, Leslie Fiedler, Norman Holland and Murray Schwartz. While at Buffalo, Bollas also worked analytically with the Heideggerian psychoanalyst Heinz Lichtenstein, and founded along with Lloyd Clarke, University Health Center's Director, a graduate training programme in psychoanalytic psychotherapy. This training programme was later integrated into a Ph.D. programme in applied psychoanalysis, administered through the Center for the Psychological Study of the Arts and directed by Norman Holland.
Several years later, Bollas moved to England and completed his training in psychoanalysis at the Institute of Psychoanalysis in London in 1977 and in Adult Psychotherapy from the Tavistock Clinic in 1978. By his own account, he came to writing later in life, publishing his first book, The Shadow of the Object, in 1987. Since that time, however, he has become one of the most prolific and influential psychoanalytic writers in England. His writing style is subtle, technically challenging at times due to a reliance on idiosyncratic terms (unthought known, transformational obje