#christopher bollas

[funeral]

I am inhabited, then, by inner structures that can be felt whenever their name is evoked; and in turn, I am also filled with the ghosts of others who have affected me. In psychoanalysis we term these "internal objects," which clearly do not designate internal pictures, or clear inner dramas, but rather highly condensed psychic textures, the trace of our encounters with the object world. This suggests, among other things, that as we encounter the object world we are substantially metamorphosed by the structure of objects; internally transformed by objects that leave their traces within us . . . . In play the subject releases the idiom of himself to the field of objects, where he is then transformed by the structure of that experience, and will bear the history of that encounter in the unconscious.

Christopher Bollas, Being a Character: Psychoanalysis and Self Experience

[sictransitgloriamvndi]

“The repressed signifies the preserved: hidden away in the organized tensions of the unconscious, wishes and their memories are ceaselessly struggling to find some way into gratification in the present - desire refuses annihilation.” - Christopher Bollas

[lickorice]

A children’s story is a kind of transitional fiction, a text that emerges from a world of the child’s fantastical certitudes and captures this magic through its fairy-tale plotting and serene narrative voice. Children’s fiction is replete with moments of horror, awe, fascination, and suspense. Self and environment are mutually transformative, as if something of the child’s sense of ontogenetic metamorphosis is registered in the fiction he reads. Often, as in The Wind in the Willows , the tale is about a journey, a picaresque adventure that is faithful to the child’s appreciation of his own psycho-somatic transformations.The Wind in the Willows is a tale of discovery. A homely and frightened little mole is befriended by an adventuresome if rather reckless water rat who insists that they travel down the river to discover the world. One morning just before dawn they are rowing quietly downstream. Suddenly the rat is startled by what he feels is some ethereal sound. ‘So beautiful and strange and new,’ he says. ‘Since it was to end so soon, I almost wish I had never heard it. For it has roused a longing in me that is pain, and nothing seems worthwhile but just to hear that sound once more and go on listening to it forever.’ The mole has heard nothing but he is respectfully alert to new possibilities. He asks his friend, the rat, what has happened, but the rat is transported into a dream state. ‘The rat never answered, if indeed he heard. Rapt, transported, trembling, he was possessed in all his senses by this new divine thing that caught up his helpless soul and swung and dandled it, a powerless but happy infant in a strong sustaining grasp.’ This experience – an aesthetic moment – feels new and strange, yet it arouses a ‘longing’; its immediate impact is not cognitively linked to any previous mental experience, yet affectively it evokes the past. Then the author, in the position of the omniscient identifier of the psychic locations of his characters, says that the rat is ‘transported’, possessed,like a ‘powerless but happy infant in a strong sustaining grasp’. The writer knows how to identify this type of experience for the child reader; he invokes the imagery of the infant being held by the mother and places the aesthetic moment in the space between the infant and the caretaker.

The Shadow of the Object Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known, Christopher Bollas

[monicadeola]

[campionaridiparoleeumori]

Citation #66

Desiderando l’altro, il Sé trova un complesso vocabolario di oggetti attraverso i quali esprimersi; l’autoerotismo, invece, è una pulsione fondamentalmente differente, più simile all’attività dell’istinto di morte, in cui gli oggetti sono scelti per estinguere il desiderio.

[culturestinks22]

When I enter the world of dreams I am deconstructed, as I am transformed from the one who holds the internal world in my mind to the one who is experientially inside the dramaturgy of the other.

Christopher Bollas, Being a Character: Psychoanalysis and Self-Experience

[strangenoquestion]

What I came to realize was that almost all psychotic behavior was comprehensible if one could discover the underlying logic of thought. And sometimes it was unintentionally and poignantly funny. One day, as the parents were waiting outside the gate to take the children home, I noticed Larry rushing back into the lunchroom. He flew to the lunch box cupboard, opened the door, took out his lunch box, went to the lunch table, opened the box, closed it, stepped back, then opened the cupboard, took out the ox, and rushed out of the room. I chased after him and, on the trot, asked him why he had done this. ‘Because I had to make up for lost time.’ I was stunned. In a way he was right. He had brought his lunch box to school that day, forgetting that his class was going on a field trip where lunch was to be provided. From Larry’s point of view he had therefore failed to have his lunch, in that he had not removed his lunch box from the cupboard, sat at the table to open it, and then taken it back to the cupboard. That moment in time had not occurred. So when he proceeded to do this at the end of the school day he was simply ‘making up for lost time.’

Christopher Bollas, When the Sun Bursts: The Enigma of Schizophrenia

[maninsun]

Aby zrozumieć pacjenta, trzeba go najpierw odnaleźć w samym sobie. Christopher Bollas