Psychic Genera

Where do those intuitive moments of inspiration and creativity in which ideas seem to fall from heaven come from? Why do some patients manage to overcome the effects of trauma and repetition and succeed in building a rich and evolving psychic life? Christopher Bollas (1992) offers an answer to these questions by proposing the existence of a receptive capacity at the heart of the unconscious from which what he calls “psychic genera” emerge. Psychic genera are unconscious, dynamic and evolving productions arising from the encounter between unconscious ideas and real experiences. Including both processes and contents, the term genera refers to the capacity for engendering psychic movement and new internal and external experiences making it possible to extend the subject's associative network. Psychic genera are formed in moments of resonance between the unconscious and the external world, moments when intuition is predominant. Fruitful meanings then well up that become attached to other groups of already existent unconscious ideas - which Bollas calls psychic “matrixes” - and acquire a new form. Unlike traumatic representations that generate deadly repetition and inhibition, this receptive dynamic of the unconscious facilitates the process of giving living meaning to the internal movements of the subject. This does not mean that psychic genera are devoid of negative dimensions. What characterises them is not the positive or negative quality of the contents that they bring into play, but their capacity to promote new links and a broader spectrum of meaning. Bollas places this concept of psychic genera in the tradition of Wilfred Bion's K function and of Freud's life drive.

A patient who had been in treatment for three years reported that the evening before he had watched a very interesting documentary on the British Crown Jewels. He thought that it was a fascinating way of looking at the history of the monarchy. As a result, he had spent the whole night researching into