Being a Character: Psychoanalysis and Self Experience [Paperback]

"...Character" paints a living picture of what it is to be a subject with an ineffable unconscious that must nevertheless be brought into unfolding expression and experience of one's being. This book seems to transcend battles between intrapsychic and relational models of the mind by showing again and again, without ever being redundant, just how it is that intersubjectivity inevitably entails unconscious communication between any two subjects, that there is a dense and polysemous nature to so much of subjective experience.

The first three chapters spell out these ideas and lay the groundwork for the rest of the book. In "Psychic Genera," a repression model of the mind is maintained but enriched by the idea of an unconscious that receives impressions "sponsored" by the object world which, when we are receptive enough, offer us new data of existence, which enlarge the very essence of who we are. This occurs when aspects of our native selves previously dormant are presented an object through which to come to life. This can only happen to the degree to which we are not restricted in our creativity by the repressed unconscious. In "The Psychoanalyst's Use of Free Association," Bollas again offers an enlarged picture of a pre-existing psychoanalytic mainstay. He shows something of what free association traditionally is and should be, while also showing how the analyst uses his unconscious in receiving and responding to the patient's free associating.

"Cutting" is an incredibly provocative essay that viscerally demonstrates the psychosexual and object-relational meanings and uses of this gripping symptom. As James Grotstein says in a review elsewhere of this essay, Bollas shows us how the patient tries to carve her idiom by "creat(ing) a symbolic entity out of the nothing that her vagina has signified for her and has been signified for her by others. It is a stab, in short, at achieving wholeness from the abjectness of her hole." In "Cruising in the Homosexual Arena," Bollas again very vividly, attending to both a phenomenological and a psychostructural depiction of his subject, demonstrates how certain homosexuals defend against an experience of primary maternal coldness by an intense erotizing of deadness and of sexual body parts in lieu of an embodied and integrated sensuality.

Without going into further detail, I will just say that, for me, Bollas's rendering of what he calls fascism and of what he calls "violent innocence" are equally provocative and evocative essays. There is more here as well, such as his essays on the oedipal complex and on "generational consciousness."

This is a book that presents a deep yet readily graspable picture of the infinite crossroads we encounter in a moment, in a dream, a symptom, an analysis, a life. It weaves striking tapestries of the choices between foreclosure and unconscious symbolic repetition of trauma on the one hand and, on the other, the fertile option of enduring the strain and the joy of the "cracking up" of our selves and its attendant symbolic elaboration of our idiom.