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Christopher Bollas's When the Sun Bursts: The Enigma of Schizophrenia presents a significant opportunity for psychoanalysis and for what psychoanalysis has to offer the world. It can be read as a call to arms for psychoanalysts, whatever our points of disagreement among ourselves. Bollas's writing has been read widely, both within and outside of the profession; it provides, then, an unusually broad dissemination of psychoanalysis as the treatment of choice for psychotics, as the author considers it to be. In these days of “evidence-based” therapies, whereby evidence is recognized and defined by health insurance and pharmaceutical interests, Bollas provides a welcome, readable and humanizing approach to a patient population that is all too commonly technocratically objectified. It offers evidence of what humane and respectful reception and treatment of the psychotic subject can be. It offers scholarly and psychoanalytical evidence of what treatment of the psychotic—and the anorectic1, whom the author several times parenthetically compares with the psychotic—might be in a world beyond scientism's rendering of everything in metrics and economics.
An overarching observation one ought to register about this new book is of its effort, like much of Bollas's oeuvre, to assimilate a variety of psychoanalytic schools and traditions that typically come only as close as, say, ships of several different navies in the same sea—prominently including modern psychoanalytic, Lacanian, and Bionian. Any such effort itself must be delimited and limited, as well as unique to its author (Ogden and Gabbard, 2016). Psychoanalysis, dealing as it does with the complex nature of the human mind, with the elusive human being, is regularly prompted to carefully consult bodies of thought too