Many schizophrenics experience their condition as one of radical incarceration, mind-altering medications, isolation, and dehumanization. At a time when the treatment of choice is anti-psychotic medication, world-renowned psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas asserts that schizophrenics can be helped by much more humane treatments, and that they have a chance to survive and even reverse the process if they have someone to talk to them regularly and for a sustained period, soon after their first...

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.Through a rereading of Freud, B...

In The Shadow of the Object, Christopher Bollas integrates aspects of Freud’s theory of unconscious thinking with elements from the British Object Relations School. In doing so, he offers radical new visions of the scope of psychoanalysis and expands our understanding of the creativity of the unconscious mind and the aesthetics of human character.During our formative years, we are continually "impressed" by the object world. Most of this experience will never be consciousl...

Essential Aloneness presents a series of lectures on DW Winnicott delivered by Christopher Bollas in the 1980s to students and staff of the Institute of Child Neuropsychiatry at the University of Rome. Those attending were familiar with Winnicott's works; indeed, many were expert. But a question remained. How do you use Winnicott's concepts in the clinical space? Bollas not only addresses that question but also writes about his own clinical formulations at the time, such as 'the t...

The book offers a radical, refreshing, innovative, provocative, and generative perspective on conflict solution whether in an organization or government. It also offers an entirely new set of terms and concepts to access, utilize, and share unconscious creativity. Almost all the top-down organizational assumptions in government and business stifle creativity rather than facilitate it. The book offers a multitude of practical improvements that will alter our understanding of vision and crea...

In Christopher Bollas' Streams of Consciousness, a wide spectrum of theory and practice are explored, sometimes appearing in simple fragments, sometimes via complex lines of thinking that are developed in detail over time. As Bollas revisits the received truths and dogmas of his profession – including his own prejudices – he demonstrates the value of open, intelligent uncertainty. Interspersed with clinical preoccupations, which highlight the richness as well as the bewildering complexity ...

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 dr...

In Christopher Bollas' Streams of Consciousness, a wide spectrum of theory and practice are explored, sometimes appearing in simple fragments, sometimes via complex lines of thinking that are developed in detail over time. As Bollas revisits the received truths and dogmas of his profession – including his own prejudices – he demonstrates the value of open, intelligent uncertainty. Interspersed with clinical preoccupations, which highlight the richness as well as the bewildering complexity ...

Meaning and Melancholia: Life in the Age of Bewilderment sees Christopher Bollas apply his creative and innovative psychoanalytic thinking to various contemporary social, cultural and political themes.This book offers an incisive exploration of powerful trends within, and between, nations in the West over the past two hundred years. The author traces shifts in psychological forces and ‘frames of mind’, that have resulted in a crucial ‘intellectual climate change’. He conte...

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.At the book's core ...

Christopher Bollas presents us with a new literary form in his Conversations: twenty-three unique dialogues to captivate, amuse, and inspire. The psychoanalyst Paula Heimann asked: 'Who is speaking? To whom? About what? And why now?' We speak with the voice and position of many others – mothers, fathers, siblings, teachers – and ordinary conversation therefore stages the history of our interpersonal engagements. Heimann's questions also apply when we talk to ourselves, and our inner dialog...

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.Creating a freely associated comparison between western psychoanalysts and eastern philosophers, Bollas demonstrates how the Eastern use of poetry evolved as a collective way to house the individual self. On one hand he ...