Being a Character: Psychoanalysis and Self Experience [Paperback]

Christopher Bollas (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 23, 2003 | ISBN-10: 0415088151 | ISBN-13: 978-0415088152 | Edition: 1

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.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

The author suggests that psychotherapists can analyze their patients' narratives of daily life in much the same way that dreams are analyzed, since the process by which each of us forms a self-image is analogous to the way we unconsciously form a dream narrative. While this is an interesting idea, Bollas's lack of reading outside his narrow specialty means that the bulk of the book is devoted to the "rediscovery" of concepts long common in philosophy, social psychology, and modern dream research. The second half of the book, consisting of a series of chapters on various analytical issues, has no apparent relationship to the first half. Much of the material is unsupported by any empirical data (e.g., he takes for granted the notions that homosexuals are obsessed with their mothers and that some children are shy because they have not successfully resolved their Oedipal crisis) or are commonplace ideas to those outside the narrow Freudian world. This book will appeal only to those libraries supporting training programs in Freudian psychoanalysis.
- Mary Ann Hughes, Washington State Univ. Libs., Pullman
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

"Being a Character explores the subject of self-knowledge and the individuals' construction of meaning in their lives. It is always stimulating, particularly through the author's use of his own self-experience. This book is well worth reading by anyone involved in psychotherapy or related work. Indeed, it could fruitfully be read by a much wider audience." - Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy

Product Details

• Paperback: 304 pages
• Publisher: Routledge; 1 edition (July 23, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0415088151
• ISBN-13: 978-0415088152
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.3 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #521,206 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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40 of 44 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Very Rich Read, December 9, 2000

By 

Joseph Scalia (Bozeman, Montana United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Being a Character: Psychoanalysis & Self Experience (Paperback)

This is a deceptively dense book, full of complex psychoanalytic theory and practice, which conveys essences of this work in ways that are poetically and evocatively moving. "Being a Character," the title and the concept, is all about the subject's ability to elaborate itself through the use of the evocative object - that which evokes aspects of ourselves which may yet have gone unexpressed. Bollas brings the psychoanalytic process and the process of generative and creative living to vivid life. His many descriptions of the seemingly infinite details that can occupy an analyst's mind, and the moving nature of these apprehensions, demonstrate in example and form the very ideas he is presenting.

"...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.