The Christopher Bollas reader

Introduction by Arne Jemstedt, Foreword by Adam Phillips Christopher Bollas, British Psychoanalytical Society, Los Angeles Institute and Society for Psychoanalytic Studies, and the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (IPTAR), Routledge, New York, 2011, 312 pp., $31.99, ISBN-13: 978-0415664615 (paperback)

In the writing on play for which he is best known, the British psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott (1971) did more than theorize the role of transitional objects in the life of children. He also cleared a space in psychoanalytic theory for nonpathological states, activities, and forms of relatedness. He wrote:

Starting as we do from psychoneurotic illness and with ego defences related to anxiety that arises out of the instinctual life, we tend to think of health in terms of the state of ego defences. We say it is healthy when these defences are not rigid, etc. But we seldom reach the point at which we can start to describe what life is like apart from illness or absence of illness. That is to say, we have yet to tackle the question of what life is about. (p. 133)

What makes us, Winnicott asks, “begin to be, to feel that life is real, to find life worth living”? (ibid.). The contemporary psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas, a prolific writer with more than a dozen books to his name, takes up these questions throughout his work, pursuing not only “creative living” in adult life, but also the extraordinary creativity of the unconscious mind, whose processes are always operating but seldom directly recognized – even, he argues, by psychoanalysis itself. The Christopher Bollas Reader collects some of his best essays, including two pieces new for this volume. It also includes a useful introduction by Arne Jemstedt, comprising a brief biography of Bollas, a summary of his central concepts, and a complete list of his publications.

In Bollas's work, the unconscious is not simply the inert place of the repressed. Rather, the unconscious is imagined as a process of both rece