Christopher Bollas And The Analyst’s Faith

I recently read Catch Them Before They Fall: The Psychoanalysis of Breakdown, by Christopher Bollas (2013). He envisions this book contributing research to a topic that has gone unrecognized, which he calls “a tragedy on a large scale” (p. 5). To this project, and primarily to the patients he believes need more adequate care, he submits his entire learning process along with the mistakes. Opening with the concepts, Bollas describes breakdown as a formal presentation of de-symbolization. He discusses the signals of its arrival, from confusion and bewilderment to alterations in the psychesoma, primarily of speech and motor skill; and he emphasizes the distress and panic surrounding fears of having “lost the self” when the ego becomes “disabled.” A breakdown is absolutely terrifying because it entails the loss of ego functioning. Once it has come into play, the chief indicator is compulsion, meaning that it is overdetermined. Here, one can no more speak of subject than of scene. It is a materialization of non-sense, an eruption of trauma that has not been represented, and since the identity of the subject is destroyed in such an instance, it cannot be considered the repetition of an event.

Bollas is often in dialogue with Winnicott and here, it is the latter’s concept of “impingement” that he converses with. Winnicott argued that environmental non-responsiveness to the child’s needs forces the child to constantly react, rupturing “going-on-being.” He used the term “annihilation” for what happens when the child is located as a point in the representational space of the Other. Without any mediation that could provide a point of reference for the child’s own position, the entire fabric of meaning falls apart, bringing with it the register of time. Impingement is traumatizing because it transpires before the psyche is formed. For this reason, it lacks dialecticism, and is experienced as death, as the end of being. While the framework for Bollas’s discussion of the concepts