The Challenge Posed by Bollas

Review of Joseph Scalia, ed., The Vitality of Objects: Exploring the Work of Christopher Bollas. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2002. Paperback ISBN 0-8195-6535-0, xiii, 228 pages, $24.95.

Although a major voice in contemporary psychoanalysis and a U.S. citizen for his first 30 years, Christopher Bollas has long since become prominent in the English Object Relations Movement while remaining largely unknown in America. This current volume in the Disseminations: Psychoanalysis in Contexts series should help remedy this situation. However, for unacquainted readers I would suggest starting with the long interview at the end of the book, proceeding to Bollas’s writings, preferably Forces of Destiny: Psychoanalysis and the Human Idiom (1989) and Being a Character: Psychoanalysis and Self Experience (1995), and then winding back around to the present papers by fellow analysts, academicians, and creative artists.

One reason for this circuitous route is that in rethinking psychoanalysis, Bollas has introduced a daunting lexicon of terms: some pre-existing in the field but given a new twist, others taken over from diverse linguistic contexts. An example of the former is D.W. Winnicott’s “true self,” of the latter is “idiom,” and of both is “transformational object.” There is also the “aleatory object” and niggling terms like “psychic genera.” So much mental labor

Page 19

is exerted in the introductory essays defining and refining these terms that they almost acquire a philosophical aura and to the uninitiated run the risk of assuming a cult-like mystique.

This murkiness dissipates when Bollas explains in his interview what he means, for example, by his revisions of Winnicott’s rather unfortunate dichotomizing of the true/false selves. Bollas plays off a more spontaneous (the true self) capacity for experience and hence a creative potential for growth against the obstacles of social compliance (the false self). This enables him to situate a positive dimension—visibly manifested as one’s idiosyncratic style or idiom—in the Freudian unconscious. Bollas values Freud’s early work on dreams, and takes the wishful aspect of dreaming as the inherent pleasure of representing per se, be it of desires, conflicts, or affects. Here is the working of a creative life-force to be recognized and cherished; the emphasis is less on the “seething cauldron” concept of the id and more on its potentials and on the ego’s unconscious depths in Freud’s later hypothesis. These deeper dimensions, like the dream’s secondary elaborations in order to gain passage to consciousness, allow for an aesthetic principle to shape mental life. Bollas is quite taken with this creative possibility, and, whether or not we see his English influence coming out, he certainly has interesting affinities with the romanticism of Blake and Wordsworth as well as the vitalism of G.B. Shaw and D.H. Lawrence.

All of this is intriguing and amusing, but it also tends to draw psychoanalysis further away from its original scientific allegiances, which may be inevitable. Some would argue the scientific project had been a lost cause all along and more of an American than a British problem. Psychoanalysis has been challenged on scientific grounds much more in the States than abroad, and has suffered so severely from neurochemical encroachments that it may never regain any claim to objective knowledge.

Paradoxically, Bollas’s great strength is also his liability. There is no question that he has reinvigorated psychoanalysis by radically rethinking its processes, and has cleared a place at the postmodern table of skepticism, which academic theorists require for legitimacy. Also, there is no question that in the present state of affairs all fields of knowledge are relative and pluralistic. So while Bollas has advanced and refined our ways of thinking about the intricacies of subjective processes and demonstrated that they are indeed more complex than we had imagined, he has further removed them from anything like scientific verifiability.

Moreover, as readers wind back around to this book’s contributors, their interests, with a rare exception, are bracketed by the mother-infant dyad as the sole locus of child development. Freud referred to this area as the Minoan-Mycenean civilization lurking behind the Greeks; but while enormous gains have since been made in exploring this hidden world, it need not be made to replace the other: the Greeks are still around. The intense urges, anxieties, and images arising out of primary ties may persist in some fashion, but they are also absorbed, assimilated, and restructured as urges and relations triangulate into the oedipal. That Bollas is tuned into these stages is deftly noted by Gabriela Mann as his sense that “psychoanalysis is trapped in an oedipal struggle between Papa-Freud and Mama-Klein” (Melanie Klein, p. 74). Bollas wants to maintain both tendencies: the empathic, intuitive, holding-supportive, maternal side along with the objective, defining, interpreting side. In agreeing with this aspiration, we also want to avoid implicitly Venus/Mars-style stereotypes.

The challenges for readers of Clio’s Psyche are similar: we need to be inclusive in our reconstructions of the past, be it of individuals or groups; and we need to open ourselves widely to the many bewildering strands of subjective entanglements, all the while struggling toward a sufficient degree of clarity to be shared as knowledge.

Page 20