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Sarah Nettleton's slim but full volume is an attempt to introduce readers to an overview of the metapsychological thinking of Christopher Bollas, one of the greatest contemporary psychoanalysts writing in English today. It is based on a number of key foundations: the published work of Bollas, including his plays and fiction (for which Nettleton was one of his editors); Nettleton's experience of being supervised by Bollas for her psychoanalytic clinical training; personal contacts and correspondence between the two of them; and, importantly for the purposes of this text, some seven years of experience of teaching seminars on Bollas' work to interested therapists and analysts in the UK, Norway, Israel, France, the USA and Turkey. I took part in one of these seminars in the UK and remember well Nettleton's serious engagement with Bollas' work and the audience's enthusiasm for and confusion with it, which made me eager to grapple with her written summary.
One of the striking things about Bollas' written work is the range and breadth of his interests - he seems as at home discussing architecture or the paintings of de Kooning, as he is developing the insights of Freud, Klein or Winnicott, or referencing Lacan, Green, and Kohut. His novels are playful and serious - following Winnicott for whom play was a serious matter, of course - and his background in English literature is clear from his fictional works as well as from the reliance in his work on words - some newly created, and some repurposed for a specific task - rather than the more abstract categories of Bion's Grid. For Bollas, like Freud, words matter greatly - they are live things that convey both the known and the unknown. This division and recombination of categories is key to Bollas' conception of unconscious work, stemming from life in utero, and permeating our relationships to ourselves and to others throughout our life.
Jungian readers of Bollas often find themselves in what seems to be familiar territory - a