Christopher Bollas argues that Freud's vision of the dream process is a model for all unconscious mental experience. In this work he extends his exploration of the inner world of human experience and suggests that the rhythm of that experience is vital to individual creativity. It allows us to develop what the author calls a separate sense, which we use to assess the meanings of our own experiences and also to attune ourselves sympathetically to the lives of other people. In this book, Bollas examines how people educate one another in the idioms of their unconscious lives, and considers the...

In Being a Character , Christopher Bollas argued that Freud's vision of the dream process is a model for all unconscious mental experience. In Cracking Up he extends his exploration of the inner world of human experience and suggests that the rhythm of that experience is vital to individual creativity. It allows us to develop what the author calls a 'separate sense', which we use to assess the meanings of our own experiences and also to attune ourselves sympathetically to the lives of other people.

In this original and thought-provoking book, Bollas examines how people...

Hysteria has disappeared from contemporary culture only insofar as it has been subjected to a repression through the popular diagnosis of 'borderline personality disorder'.
In Hysteria the distinguished psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas offers an original and illuminating theory of hysteria that weaves its well-known features - repressed sexual ideas; indifference to conversion; over-identification with the other - into the hysteric form.
Through a rereading of Freud, Bollas argues that sexuality in itself is traumatic to all children, as it 'destroys' the relation to the...

Uses detailed studies of real clinical practice to illuminate a theory of psychoanalysis which privileges the human impulse to question. This title includes transcripts of real analytical sessions, accompanied by parallel commentaries which highlight key aspects of the free associative method in practice.

'The Evocative Object World' builds on Freud's account of dream formation, combining it with perceptive clinical, theoretical and cultural insights to show how the psychoanalytical method can provide a rich understanding of what has traditionally been regarded as 'the outside world'.

In this exploration of a radical approach to the psychoanalytical treatment of people on the verge of mental breakdown, Christopher Bollas offers a new and courageous clinical paradigm.

He suggests that the unconscious purpose of breakdown is to present the self to the other for transformative understanding; to have its core distress met and understood directly. If caught in time, a breakdown can become a breakthrough. It is an event imbued with the most profound personal significance, but it requires deep understanding if its meaning is to be released to its transformative...

This reader brings together a selection of seminal papers by Christopher Bollas.

Essays such as "The Fascist State of Mind," "The Structure of Evil," and "The Functions of History" have established his position as one of the most significant cultural critics of our time. Also included are examples of his psychoanalytical writings, such as "The Transformational Object" and "Psychic Genera," that deepen and renew interest in unconscious creative processes. Two recent essays, "Character and Interformality" and "The...

Several thousand years ago Indo-European culture diverged into two ways of thinking; one went West, the other East. Tracing their differences, Christopher Bollas examines how these mentalities are now converging once again, notably in the practice of psychoanalysis.　　

Creating a freely associated comparison between western psychoanalysts and eastern philosophers, Bollas demonstrates how the Eastern use of poetry evolved as a collective way to house the individual self. On one hand he links this tradition to the psychoanalytic praxes of Winnicott and Khan,...

Bollas eloquently argues for a return to our understanding of how Freudian psychoanalysis works unconscious to unconscious. Failure to follow Freud's basic assumptions about psychoanalytical listening has resulted in the abandonment of searching for -the logic of sequence- which Freud regarded as the primary way we express unconscious thinking. In two extensive interviews and follow-up essays, all occurring in 2006, we follow Christopher Bollas exploring his most recent and radical challenge to contemporary psychoanalysis. The Freudian Moment, Bollas argues, realizes a phylogenetic...