The Soul of Psychoanalysis in the Modern World: Reflections on the Work of Christopher Bollas

The paper begins with the claim that psychoanalysis faces a dilemma in locating itself in a contemporary world that devalues experiences of interiority, depth, and embeddedness in personal history. Psychoanalysis's coming to terms with this modern world—reflected in contemporary relational paradigms and emphases on interaction, authority, and epistemology—is essential yet tends to replace an outdated conformity with an updated one, in which what is offered to analysands may become limited and the soul of psychoanalysis lost.

Bollas's work attempts to reinspire psychoanalysis. This paper explores his contributions and the tensions within them and develops several points about how psychoanalysis can maintain a worthwhile self—for itself and for its analysands—in the modern world. Among the issues discussed are the sense in which an endogenous motivational core associated with an emphasis on interiority may be compatible with a relational paradigm and how the notion of personal idiom is a rich and fruitful one, but that the cultural field deserves a more fundamental place than it is given by Bollas. The problem of authority and exploitation, within and outside the consulting room, is also taken up, and it is argued that psychoanalysis should be conceived as a moral discourse in which the analyst's self-subverting (but not diminished) authority is essential.