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The Mystery of Things, Christopher Bollas's latest book, is an ambitious and beautifully written treatise that takes us to the heart of the psychoanalytic endeavour. Bollas re-examines the fundamental concepts inherent in the analytic method by looking at the mysterious encounter between the two participants, analyst and analysand. He explores the illusory and deeply evocative nature of the analytic space and therapeutic alliance, where unconscious subjective communication forms new objective psychic life, where both verbal and visual orders operate, where the imaginary and the symbolic can be explored, and where time and space can be apprehended in new ways. By examining the process of psychoanalysis, Bollas exposes forms of knowledge marginalised by Western discourse.
The first third of the book explores the free-associative process, a method that has perhaps been taken for granted among psychoanalysts today, but that Bollas considers central to the analytic enterprise. Bollas considers Freud's discovery of free-association as the most sophisticated method that has been developed in Western culture for unconscious life to matriculate into consciousness, a discovery which has had a revolutionary influence on the history of Western epistemology. The core of Freud's technique was the unconscious communication elicited between the patient's free-association and the analyst's evenly-suspended attentiveness. Free-association runs counter to the logical, rational and conscious method of acquiring ‘scientific’ knowledge promoted by the empiricist tradition.
Bollas argues that other, no less important, forms of knowledge are revealed by the psychoanalytic method which are essential to the treatment of pathological states of mind and to the discovery of psychic truths. Free-association is a paradoxical process, one that by its very destructive nature, through the dissemination of thought, creates new orders of knowing. The dream, Freud's cornerstone of the psychoanalytic move