Being a Character: Psychoanalysis and Self Experience

by Christopher Bollas

Each person invests many of the objects in his life with his or her own unconscious meaning, each person subsequently voyages through an environment that constantly evokes the self's psychic history. Taking Freud's model of dreamwork as a model for all unconscious thinking, Christopher Bollas argues that we dreamwork ourselves into becoming who we are, and illustrates how the analyst and the patient use such unconscious processes to develop new psychic structures that the patient can use to alter his or her self experience. Building on this foundation, he goes on to describe some very special forms of self experience, including the tragic madness of women cutting themselves, the experience of a cruising homosexual in bars and bathes and the demented ferocity of the facist state of mind. An original interpreter of classical theory and clinical issues, in Being a Character Christopher Bollas takes the reader into the very texture of the psychoanalytic process.

Genres: Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Nonfiction

Paperback

First published January 1, 1992

About the author

Christopher Bollas, Ph.D. is a Member of the International Psychoanalytical Association and has been practicing for over fifty years. Former Director of Education at the Austen Riggs Center he was Visiting Professor of Psychoanalysis at the Institute of Child Neuropsychiatry of the University of Rome. He is a prolific author and international lecturer.

Reviews

[Alona Nikolaienko (Kiiko) · Rating 5 out of 5]

Досить непросто читати першу частнину.
Друга спонукає до роздумів.

[William Yonts · Rating 5 out of 5]

My third Bollas book that I’ve read this year, and I plan on reading more, at least The Infinite Question and Forces of Destiny. How funny that, in a book that explores the various ways we use internal and external objects to elaborate the self, I feel so many new avenues of thought opening up, the book acting as a sort of generative self-fulfilling prophecy. My favorite new ideas here are those of genera and the receptive unconscious, useful corollaries to trauma and the repressive unconscious, and how both sides of the receptive/repressive unconscious inform the essays in the second half.