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What is overdue and excellent in Bollas's new book is his reminder to English-speaking psychoanalysts that sex is important, even crucial in the understanding and treatment of patients and in building theory that can guide that practice. The book makes a passionate case for the return to thinking about hysteria and the pathologic avoidance of sexuality. At this time of general and almost exclusive interest in the pathology of aggression and of narcissistic disorders, it is a breath of fresh air, or, more exactly, a whiff of a half-forgotten erotic perfume.
But this is not a simple evocation of the Freud and Breuer work on hysteria. It comes with a more modern view of development that postulates early mother-infant relations as the cause of hysteria and rounds out the picture by including the role of the father. Bollas is interested in creating taxonomic classification of character disorders in order to differentiate the hysterical character from the narcissistic, borderline and schizophrenic characters. It is his project to highlight the hysterical character in order to make clear what he claims is the misdiagnosis of hysterics as one of the other character disorders. He makes the distinctions among these character disorders by sketching the clinical manifestations and narratives of the mother-infant patterns. He asserts that the primary objects created by the relations with the mother force their later relations to the world into the mold based on this primary object relation. The mental image that is the primary object then determines not only the adult's relationship with others in the immediate surround, but also determines how the person sees these others and the kind of reactions evoked from the others by the behavior based on the unconscious mental image that is the primary object.
According to Bollas, each character structure is formed in reaction to an early experience of mothering. The narcissistic character is one who experienced the mother as uneven and th