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Having spent nearly forty years as a “practitioner of the unconscious” (P. Gherovici, personal communication, May, 2012), Christopher Bollas is arguably one of the most creative minds at work in the English-speaking psychoanalytic world. Though he is a more controversial figure in England where his critique of things Kleinian is not so welcome, his more than 13 books
and countless journal articles are taught at a myriad of North American psychoanalytic institutes. Given the diversity and contentiousness among schools of thought, this is no small feat.
That he has developed his own metapsychology, one that reflects his encounters with analysts and analytic thinking that range from Bion to Coltart, from Freeman-Sharpe to Lacan, and from Khan to Phillips, not to mention Winnicott, is both significant and breathtaking. While he has not yet been fully acknowledged for this accomplishment, allow yourself to ponder the following terms that since the late 1980s he has generated and elaborated (in doing so, you may have an “aha” moment): the “receptive unconscious,” the “un-thought known,” the “human idiom,” and “psychic genera,” to name just a few. They knit themselves together to form a particular view of human experience at the level of the psyche: the weave is tight.
In Catch Them Before They Fall: The Psychoanalysis of Breakdown, Bollas's metapsychology comes to life, although much of it is implied, providing the vital roots for his clinical decision-making. Having for many years quite surreptitiously attended to patients on the cusp of psychic disarray primarily by using the talking cure (aka psychoanalysis), albeit altering the frame of its practice as needed, he makes a powerful argument that can be heard as a wake-up call for the profession as well as a clinical primer on working with psychic breakdown.
In what can be read as a kind of political declaration, Bollas writes the following: “Psychoanalysis is the treatment of choice [italics added] for patients who are b