You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
It has been said that the history of Western philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato. Perhaps the history of psychoanalysis will come to be seen as a series of footnotes to Freud. Certainly Bollas suggests as much when he writes that: ‘Each generation of psychoanalysts returns to Freud, not simply to study the origins of psychoanalysis, but because his writings are so profound that one discovers a paragraph here or a sentence there that will provoke a rethinking of contemporary assumptions’ (The Evocative Object World, pp. 19-20).
Bollas's work can be seen as an ongoing engagement with Freud, a dialogue in which he feels free to criticize, disagree, revise, expand, modify, or make links with other psychoanalytic theories, while always considering Freud to be the one who made the crucial discovery-not the discovery of the unconscious per se, but the discovery of a way to access unconscious thoughts via the invention of the psychoanalytic session and the method of free association (Bollas, 2007, pp. 1-2). One of the key Freudian paragraphs for Bollas is the following, in which Freud outlines the psychoanalytic method:
Experience soon showed that the attitude which the analytic physician could most advantageously adopt was to surrender himself to his own unconscious mental activity, in a state of evenly suspended attention, to avoid so far as possible reflection and the construction of conscious expectations, not to try to fix anything he heard particularly in his memory, and by these means to catch the drift of the patient's unconscious with his own unconscious. (Freud, 1923[1922], p. 239)
Bollas argues that the idea of communication between the analysand's unconscious and that of the analyst, formalized in the psychoanalytic