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What does it mean to be a character? If, as Christopher Bollas writes, “Wisdom is measured by increased uncertainty about the meanings of our self, or of life” (p. 61), then these thoughtful essays urge us to deepen our wisdom about the human conditions and the endeavor of psychoanalysis. Bollas leads the analytic debate into the realm of reverie, and he succeds brilliantly in extracting from our elusive subjectivity a compassionate grasp of how we may, or may not, connect with one another.
It is Bollas' belief that each of us possesses a unique idiom of psychic organization which constitutes the core of our self. As we grow, he says, this inner presence becomes more complex, and more mysterious to our consciousness. Indeed, the true self is unconsciousness, profoundly known yet unthought, and its joy comes from the surrender to experience that transforms subjectivity into reality. To be a character, then, is to find the unconscious idiom of one's self released into being. Bollas suggests that this articulation of the simple experiencing self is the dream work of life. It is accomplished through the selection and use of objects, both animate and not, that transform our “latent deep structure into surface expression” (p. 54).
Bollas proposes a “collisional dialectic” (p. 60) to describe the process by which our selves are nourished by the object world. With each encounter, our subjectivity is newly informed, and we gain a history of highly condensed psychic textures, or “internal objects”