Christopher Bollas > Quotes

“Past and history are not the same. Past is what happened. It consists of events that affected the patient's self, some of which he can remember, but the most he is having trouble remembering. History is transforming the past to a story that the person tells himself. Sometimes, the story stems from the past, but even the most sincere patient's history is more like a myth.
(Translated from the Hebrew edition).”
― Christopher Bollas, The Infinite Question

“Why we ask questions: Questions are the basis of human freedom. Our mind, as a part of our  self experience, is curious and always challenging that part of us that can think about the essence of things. We interpret our lives all the time - with unconscious deep conceptualization - and these conceptualization raise questions.
Why did I feel the way I felt yesterday when I spoke with X? What is the meaning of my answer? Why I chose to spend time in X's company and not Y's? And how it changed my attitude toward Y?
(Interesting paragraph I translated from the Hebrew edition)”
― Christopher Bollas, The Infinite Question

“The schizophrenic position is one where a self’s embedment in the solace of the quotidian is breached, and consciousness is confronted with both the complexities of thought processes and the raw materials of unconscious function.”
― Christopher Bollas, When the Sun Bursts: The Enigma of Schizophrenia

“The aesthetic moment constitutes this deep rapport between subject and object”
― Christopher Bollas

“Unfortunately, paranoid retreat from complexity fates the paranoid to live within an increasingly isolated enclave, even if they are joined by millions of fellow recluses. In retreat from all who do not share the paranoid’s vision of reality, he regards others as “aliens” who threaten the hegemony of paranoia. Indeed, anyone with other ideas is a migrant seeking to cross the borders of the mind. They must be kept out at all costs because they threaten the paranoid’s construction of a defensive identity. This has been effective in providing the paranoid self with a powerful and pleasurable sense of cohesion in a world that otherwise seems contaminated by its opposite: by plurality.”
― Christopher Bollas, Meaning and Melancholia: Life in the Age of Bewilderment

“We never just read the text. The text reads us. It creates room for us to move.”
― Christopher Bollas, Essential Aloneness: Rome Lectures on DW Winnicott

“Sight replaces insight. Visual experiences are sought as truths-in-themselves in a world that displaces language with images. The production, transmission and consumption of images are all accomplished with remarkable speed: a form of thinking I am terming sightophilia.”
― Christopher Bollas, Meaning and Melancholia: Life in the Age of Bewilderment

“In the absence of sufficient stimulating and novel experiences, the self gradually loses interest in seeking the spice of life because it cannot remember what this felt like. With nothing enriching to recall, memory itself becomes atrophied; with loss of memory other intellectual capacities dwindle, and eventually there arrives a new matrix of existential psychic positions: a general impoverishment of the ego that is accompanied by a deep and widespread depression. Their fellow compound selves may serve as a group that provides mutual admiration, but with the lack of fresh blood and fresh thinking, in the end the euphorias of success and glitter wear off. Although still surrounded by conspicuous wealth and provision, these now serve to objectify their alienation.”
― Christopher Bollas, Meaning and Melancholia: Life in the Age of Bewilderment

“But the United States lost more than its innocence in the 1960s. Its moral deterioration constituted one of the most catastrophic collective mental breakdowns the world had ever witnessed.”
― Christopher Bollas, When the Sun Bursts: The Enigma of Schizophrenia

“We distinguish, then, between our substantive self, a content that we transmit to others, and our formative self, who is the communicator, the vehicle of such dissemination. We may not like to think of ourselves as equivalent to iPads, smartphones and the like, but we have become extensions of these objects as much as they are extensions of us. In this respect we are now vital parts of the form-world of trans- missive devices: indeed, when we upgrade these devices we also upgrade ourselves.”
― Christopher Bollas, Meaning and Melancholia: Life in the Age of Bewilderment

“Throughout, the analysand’s speech undermines his authority; the mere fact of free association deconstructs any tragic hero’s destiny. Indeed, a patient well into analysis knows that each session has an ironic fate: one begins with a notion of what one is going to talk about, only to discover that speaking dismantles intentions and brings up unexpected material. The self that wants to master its narration is continuously slipping up in its intentions. This aspect of psychoanalysis is an entirely different world from the tragic world where blindness meets up with insight. Here the parapraxal self speaks in an absurd space, and psychoanalysis is a comic structure; the analysand is turned upside down by the intrinsic subversions of unconsciously driven speech. A patient in analysis is straight man to his unconscious, and it is a long time, if ever, before he comes to enjoy the comedy. This is true of life in general.”
― Christopher Bollas, The Christopher Bollas Reader

“By transforming the past into a history, the psychoanalyst creates a series of densely symbolic stories that will serve as ever-present dream material in the patient’s life, generating constant and continuous associations. Unlike the past, which as a signifier sits in the self as a kind of lead weight, history requires work, and when the work is done the history is sufficiently polysemous to energize many unconscious elaborations. The work of recollecting seemingly insignificant details from the past symbolically brings prior selves contained in these mnemic objects back to life – and in this way transforms debris into meaningful presence – and thus is the work of a life instinct, but ironically it also puts these past lives into a new place of destruction, for the unconscious work has a dismantling effect, as historical texts of reconstruction give birth to other ideas and contrary reflective theories, which destroy the placid aim of creating commemorative plaques to one’s new discoveries. Historical construction collects in order to retrieve the self from its many meaningless deaths – the amnesial ‘gone’ – and then it generatively destroys these details and saturates them with new meaning created through the very act of retrieval, which has given them the imaginative and symbolic energy to make this past available for the self’s future.”
― Christopher Bollas, The Christopher Bollas Reader

“Eventually the sense of seeking, and being looked after by, a caretaking other permeates the relationship of our self to our mind. We look to our mind to help us sort out an infinity of problems, guiding our self (consciousness) through the complex matrix of everyday life and its transcendental spin-offs – reveries, inspirations, and the dreams to follow that night. This suggests that the search for meaning has always been connected with the renewing rediscovery,throughout our existence, of a form of love – the loved self –that was there in the beginning of our lives.”
― Christopher Bollas, Meaning and Melancholia: Life in the Age of Bewilderment

“the subjective factor. Therefore, we write of ‘blank selves’ (Giovacchini, 1972), ‘blank psychoses’ (Donnet and Green, 1973), and an ‘organizing personality’ (Hedges, 1983).”
― Christopher Bollas, The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known

“Mirrors should reflect a little before throwing back images,’ wrote Cocteau.”
― Christopher Bollas, The Christopher Bollas Reader

“The late twentieth century has been characterized as witness to the death of language (“linguisticide”), giving way to sign-systems of shared emotiveness, platitudes, clichés, and so forth. In this era of anodyne speech, to re-find more sophisticated uses of language is to empower the self as it turns towards the tasks of introspection. To discover, or rediscover, the pleasure of language constitutes an important emotional experience; verbal articulation releases suffocated affects and emotions that have been buried, foreclosed and compromised by degraded forms of thinking and a loss of interest in speech itself.”
― Christopher Bollas, Meaning and Melancholia: Life in the Age of Bewilderment

“Often, the schizophrenic is not trying to tell you something; instead, he seeks to wrap you up, syntactically, in his way of experiencing the world.”
― Christopher Bollas, When the Sun Bursts: The Enigma of Schizophrenia

“David, a young man in his mid- twenties, looked at me warily. I had asked him how he knew that something crucial in him had changed. He was silent for a while, and then said, “When the sun burst.”
For David this was a defining moment. He knew he had seen the sun burst. It was impossible that they had not seen this; it could only be that they were lying to him. Why would they do that? It must be because they were in cahoots with the forces that burst the sun. So he had to shut himself up, remain still. He did this for ten years, until his next schizophrenic “episode.”
What does David teach us? Let’s pursue one line of thought. Life is normal until the apocalypse. Even if the signs of catastrophe seem mild—a feeling of being out of place, but it passes, the impression of hearing voices, the sense that something has entered the body—the schizophrenic will never forget those first experiences. Some process seems to be altering the self without any conscious choice involved in the mutation. After these shocks, everything changes. The world is not the same; people are no longer safe. But the rest of humanity seems oblivious. In schizophrenia, unlike other psychotic distresses, there are usually a number of these apocalyptic moments in which the person’s world view is changed.”
― Christopher Bollas, When the Sun Bursts: The Enigma of Schizophrenia

“Even though we shall never know what infants think, we can assume that their first experiences of the world are sensory. These will be made up in utero, for example, of the sound of the mother’s heart and internal organs, the infiltration of light, the senses of movement and taste, and later the sense of smell. What is important is the heterogeneity of the primitive sensorium in its apprehension of lived experience. I believe that many schizophrenics return to this early sensorial world, to somatoform experience and representation. Before wording or conceptual thinking, somatoforms express the self ’s nascent experience through the body’s lexicon. One difficulty we face in understanding schizophrenics is the extent to which we have lost touch with such early forms of experience and representation.”
― Christopher Bollas, When the Sun Bursts: The Enigma of Schizophrenia

“It seems we are being asked to assume a role as part of the function of the network, indeed, to identify with it in order to reverse our initial passive position into an active one. If the constant presentation of new transmissive objects makes us anxious, one solution is to reverse the anxiety proactively, by eagerly awaiting the new transmissive object so that we can be “ahead of the game”. Indeed, if our next role is announced to us some months ahead of time, with the prospect of new technological inventions already providing a heads-up as to expected functional changes, we can be in role as soon as the commodity appears.”
― Christopher Bollas, Meaning and Melancholia: Life in the Age of Bewilderment

“Although the rest of the population came nowhere near this standard of luxury, the ethos of life in the compound spread insidiously across the upper middle class. It was no longer necessary to visit retail outlets; now anything people desired for material comfort could be simply ordered and delivered. Professionals would provide in-home visits: there was rarely a need to venture into the outside world. When people dined out or visited the theatre or cinema, they remained inside an unconscious envelope derived from the compound culture. They walked amongst the ordinary folks of their cities like tourists who found the lives of the locals “interesting” or “amusing” or “sad”; a sort of moral compensation for dissociated indifference.
In time, however, some of these compound selves began to suffer from a paradoxical internal situation: they had everything, yet it gave them little.”
― Christopher Bollas, Meaning and Melancholia: Life in the Age of Bewilderment

“The fast pace of social media and globalized interconnections and networking meant that a human response time to fast-breaking news was now redundant. With alarming political and environmental conflicts on the horizon, the fear of our inadequacy left us bewildered, and many sought refuge in identification with the system, as transmissive selves. The psychology of the millennial generation aimed to shield the self from the disturbing mental contents of national and world events by becoming part of the machinery that delivered the content.”
― Christopher Bollas, Meaning and Melancholia: Life in the Age of Bewilderment

“It is of interest that from the seventeenth century the word ‘vicious’ was used to describe a fault in logic, when a conclusion was realized by false means of reasoning. Webster’s third definition of the vicious circle cites this fault in logic: ‘an argument which is invalid because its conclusion rests upon a premise which itself depends on the conclusion.”
― Christopher Bollas, The Christopher Bollas Reader

“Live in fragments no longer” alludes to a psychological catastrophe in selves who no longer feel internally integrated. Their inner life – as opposed to what they may say to others –is fragmented because a psychic division has occurred between feeling and speech. It is a rift felt most acutely in our inner narratives as we speak lived experience to our self.”
― Christopher Bollas, Meaning and Melancholia: Life in the Age of Bewilderment

“The repressed refers to specific mental contents that have been banished from consciousness; the oppressed refers to human thinking that has been forced to become suspended or distorted. Whereas a repressed thought can return to consciousness through the re-routing of ideas, the oppressed involves an alteration, not in the contents of the mind, but in its capacities; it compromises the mental process that would have constructed the thought to begin with, producing a cumulative degradation of perception, thinking and communication. The repressed, therefore, re- sides in the unconscious as the successful work of censorship; the oppressed is also to be found in the unconscious but as a failed effort, bearing the trace of what might have been ideationally created.”
― Christopher Bollas, Meaning and Melancholia: Life in the Age of Bewilderment

“There is an ethics of perception. Theories are not simply forms of perception. When practised they become ethical decisions.”
― Christopher Bollas, The Christopher Bollas Reader

“Historian and psychoanalyst are experienced in the discovery of things done in the past. They know how to find hidden details, but once they are brought into the light of day, these details, although of course subject to interpretation, are too polysemous to stay in any one subjectivity’s perspective. The discoveries – when true ones – displace the finder.”
― Christopher Bollas, The Christopher Bollas Reader

“There is a collective mourning currently endemic in Western cultures, and further afield, and this involves a loss of belief in cherished values and standards. When societies have been strongly identified with lost beliefs, this can cause a collective loss of sense of self. It seems that the catastrophes of the twentieth century may have left much of the world in the ideological equivalent of a clinical depression.”
― Christopher Bollas, Meaning and Melancholia: Life in the Age of Bewilderment

“We distinguish, then, between our substantive self, a content that we transmit to others, and our formative self, who is the communicator, the vehicle of such dissemination. We may not like to think of ourselves as equivalent to iPads, smartphones and the like, but we have become extensions of these objects as much as they are extensions of us. In this respect we are now vital parts of the form-world of transmissive devices: indeed, when we upgrade these devices we also upgrade ourselves.”
― Christopher Bollas, Meaning and Melancholia: Life in the Age of Bewilderment