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In two remarkable books about unconscious communication, Christopher Bollas restores Freud's original understanding of unconscious thinking. He distinguishes between two forms of unconscious work: reception and repression. And he notes that while, in all theoretical schools, psychoanalysts have adopted Freud's theory of repression, they have abandoned his theory of reception. Instead of following the sequential logic of the multiple thoughts presented in a psychoanalytic session, analysts tend to listen to derivatives of repressed material. This has led to a selective bias in the listening process, which in itself becomes a repressive force and eliminates unconscious perception and unconscious organisation and communication from psychoanalytic theory. Bollas considers this is “a remarkable act of auto-castration”.
Building on extensive clinical experience and on his previous work as a writer of both fiction and psychoanalytic texts, Bollas integrates his previous contributions in The evocative object world. He returns to Freud's theory about unconscious life as a dreamlike form of thinking and being, and combines this perspective with his own profound insights on clinical and cultural aspects of everyday life. He presents several examples of how we live our lives day-to-day, spontaneously free-associating and creating relationships to the world and to ourselves. Bollas takes us on a journey of different strands of his own free associations. He describes how architecture and our physical environment influence our dream life and how our interactions with the material and human objects surrounding us influence our thoughts about ourselves and the world. An especially important evocative object is the family, which is not simply constituted, for example, by a couple who have a baby, but which also includes a psychic space with an impact on those who belong to it that goes beyond that of its individual members. Bollas writes that the family is “a psychic object that acts