Christopher Bollas

Read: June - July 2007
Fascinating insight for the intrigued lay-person into the method of psychoanalysis, and hint at what a trascendental, poetic, frustrating, liberating experience it must be. Punctured some of my assumptions that this is a straightforward practical treatment (indeed free association is precisely non-linear) and suggests a truer description of it should be a "translation" rather than an "analysis" -it is not so much that anything is being "solved" as that it gives a place show more for and form of communication that allows the unconsious to become conscious (see p.10, 66) - it facilitates the pleasure of being understood and recognised - and although the book argues that the effects of participating are to increase emotional and unconsious capacity, to have a fuller sense of oneself and that this sense of being more informed does transform the analysand's life it doesn't fully explain how this is manifested or why the analysand would ever leave the relationship and give this pleasure up (p.72).Lucid, expressive prose made these ideas perhaps as accessible as they are ever going to be to an amateur, and really fascinating examples of decryptions of specific trains of thought/chains of free associations show less