Product Description: Bollas aboga elocuentemente por el retorno a nuestra comprensión de cómo funciona el psicoanálisis freudiano de inconsciente a inconsciente. El incumplimiento de los supuestos básicos de Freud acerca de la escucha psicoanalítica se ha traducido en el abandono de la búsqueda de la “la lógica de la secuencia”, que Freud consideraba la forma principal en la que expresamos el pensamiento inconsciente...read more

Product Description: 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...read more

Product Description: 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...read more

Product Description: 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...read more

Product Description: 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...read more

In The Evocative Object World Christopher Bollas 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'. Moving from the fundamentals of the free associative technique, through an examination of how architecture and the built environment interact with individual and societal dream life, Bollas extends the work of psychoanalysis beyond relations with literature and culture to the actual objects which surround us. As with the evocative external structures of our environment, Bollas describes how the family, with its inherited genetic structures, likewise constitutes a pre-existent unconscious formation into which we are placed, and demonstrates that there is more to this multifaceted unit than the traditional psychoanalytical notion of the Oedipal triangle. In the process, Bollas also provides a fascinating and comprehensive review of how his own theories have evolved over the past three decades: a period during which, in his view, Western society has increasingly neglected – or even become actively hostile towards – unconscious life. Throughout this engaging and accessible text, Bollas rejects the simplistic notion that mental life is unconsciously determined. Instead he provides a compelling study of how unconscious life is shaped by a diverse array of both internal and external factors, and how the work of the Freudian pair provides the best means to gain insight into our dreams, our surroundings, our families – and our mental life as a whole.

Product Description: In his latest book Christopher Bollas uses detailed studies of real clinical practice to illuminate a theory of psychoanalysis which privileges the human impulse to question. From earliest childhood to the end of our lives, we are driven by this impulse in its varying forms, and The Infinite Question illustrates how Freud's free associative method provides both patient and analyst with answers and, in turn, with an ongoing interplay of further questions...read more

Product Description: Mayhem is Christopher Bollas's third novella, following the highly acclaimed Dark at the End of the Tunnel and I Have Heard the Mermaids Singing. Readers return to the urban village where the psychoanalyst and a diverse mix of other characters encounter life...read more

Product Description: The main characters of these five plays by Christopher Bollas struggle to survive in a post-"Catastrophe" world. As they go about ordinary life, it is clear that something insidious has both preceded their existence, colored it, and is everywhere and nowhere...read more

Product Description: This dark comic novella follows the life of "the psychoanalyst" in an urban village engaging a cast of characters with whom he shares his life and his ideas. A vulnerable yet thoughtful person shadowed by what he refers to as life after the Catastrophe, he finds himself celebrating "depression", discovering how it is an essential emotion housing insight into the self, society, and world affairs...read more

Product Description: 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...read more

Product Description: This cross-genre novella introduces a comic hero - the psychoanalyst - who muses on ordinary yet essential psychological, philosophical and theological questions following The Catastrophe. Everyday scenes and characters form a background as he considers various issues, most centrally a feeling that good and evil have become inverted and that the western world has lost its meaning...read more

Product Description: 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...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: In The Mystery of Things, Christopher Bollas takes the reader right to the heart of psychotherapy, examining the mysterious aspects of the self that are revealed by analysis. The method of enquiry at the heart of psychoanalysis, that is, free association, runs contrary to everything that we are taught is the logical, rational, scientific way to acquire data...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: The practice of observing therapeutic confidentiality is so riddled with exceptions that it has all but disappeared. This book lucidly describes the disappearance of privacy, showing how the clinical effect of this loss has been destructive and how mental health professionals may respond constructively...read more

Product Description: Christopher Bollas is an exponent of the ideas, meanings and experience of psychoanalysis currently writing in English. Here he examines and reflects on one of the fundamental questions: what is it that is unique about us as individuals? How does this manifest itself in our personalities, relationships and in the psychoanalytic process...read more

Product Description: Christopher Bollas is an exponent of the ideas, meanings and experience of psychoanalysis currently writing in English. Here he examines and reflects on one of the fundamental questions: what is it that is unique about us as individuals? How does this manifest itself in our personalities, relationships and in the psychoanalytic process...read more

Product Description: 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...read more

Product Description: Basing his view on the object relations theories of the "British School" of psychoanalysis, Christopher Bollas examines the human subject's memories of its earliest experiences (during infancy and childhood) of the object, whether it be mother, father, or self...read more