The metapsychology of Christopher Bollas

In this slim volume, Sarah Nettleton provides a luminously clear and accessible overview of Chrisopher Bollas’ key psychoanalytic ideas. A renowned teacher and scholar of his work, she is well placed to offer such a useful guide.

The book is meticulously organised. Each chapter is devoted to a key concept such as ‘psychic dualities’, ‘idiom’, and ‘the unthought known’, and begins with a list of the key papers in which each concept is explored. In an appendix, there is a summary of selected papers. The index, in turn, is thorough. The reader can approach the subject from the direction of the individual concepts, or from browsing the papers that might be of interest.

There are many highlights. In Chapter 8 on ‘Unconscious Complexity’, Nettleton, herself a musician, describes Bollas’ notion that the elements of a psychoanalytic session resemble an orchestral score, in which there is both temporal movement from left to right on the page, and levels or threads of meaning, represented by the individual instruments, which may operate simultaneously and assume prominence at different times. In the analytic setting these threads might include ‘the patient’s narrative and its presentation; thoughts and feelings as they evolve in both patient and analyst; body expression; the diverse strands of the patient’s individual history and the shared history of the analytic work; the predominant transference relationship and other transient transference phenomena; …the projective use of the analytic object … and unconscious psychic structures that represent paradigms derived from early experience’ (pp. 56–57). The list is too long to be reproduced in its entirety, and Nettleton emphasises that it is still not comprehensive. The point to be stressed is that Bollas argues for an appreciation of the complexity and multiplicity of unconscious processes in operation at any one time, and moreover, that this complexity is a source of great richness and creativity. The following chapter, on ‘Fre