This area for writing and experiences is dedicated to the work of the North-american writer and psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas. Bollas's thoughts shall be spotted in multiple connections with other fields of knowledge: the psychoanalysis schools, the philosophy, the literature, and the cinema. Moreover, the debate among the many psychoanalysis schools is our leading interest.
João Paulo Ayub “…when it comes to character reception, the analyst’s sensibility is akin to the frame of mind one is in when listening to poetry”. Christopher Bollas Christopher Bollas is a singular author within the psychoanalytic tradition. Such a statement could be illustrated from an ensemble of concepts, theories, and developments... Continue Reading →
Amnéris Maroni ‘Character and interformality’ is one of the most impressive chapters from the book The Christopher Bollas Reader, published in London in 2011. Since his first books, in the late 80’s, especially in Forces of Destiny, which now gains a new translation and edition by the Brazilian publishing house Escuta, Bollas has dealt with... Continue Reading →
Vera Barbosa In the introduction to his book Hysteria, Christopher Bollas considers that, by approaching something as complex as hysteria, we are obliged to use all points of view and knowledge to distinguish the essential features and to have an integrated view of the functioning of the hysterical character. Equally relevant are the biological... Continue Reading →
I've posted on my Facebook page, a short quotation of Christopher Bollas on the Fascist Mind. Such quotation raised a nice debate, a vivid discussion with various psychoanalysts. For this reason, that post and its following debate opens this section Talking About Bollas. Amnéris Maroni. The Bollasian Concept of Fascism and Other Comments. Fascism can... Continue Reading →
by João Paulo Ayub Elaborate Selves: Reflections and Reveries (Routledge) is a volume of interviews published in 1997, in which some psychoanalysts and culture scholars were invited to compose a set of analyses and reflections on the “status of the self in the contemporary world”.1 According to Anthony Molino, interviewer and book editor, the... Continue Reading →
João Paulo Ayub The hell of the living is not something that will be: if there is one, it is what is already here, the hell where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the... Continue Reading →
Amnéris Maroni In an interview for Revista Percurso (1998), Christopher Bollas presents us an interesting political debate within psychoanalysis: a war among the schools that assume pure minds, non-contaminated minds, and that is, from the author’s perspective, one of the features typical of a fascist mind. That war would also nullify one of the... Continue Reading →
Interview: When the Sun Bursts - The enigma of schizophrenia João Paulo Ayub “Schizophrenia is enigmatic”. This sentence, extracted from Christopher Bollas’s book When the Sun Bursts, doesn’t translate just the psychoanalyst’s/writer’s intellectual curiosity, someone who has dedicated decades of his life to the treatment of people who experiments very difficult psychic events. Together with an... Continue Reading →
The difficult art of being together (or to break up) Luis Fernando Santos No self-help preacher feels any embarrassment in talking about endings. Dates, marriages, jobs, ideas, erotic relations—all that sort of things with which a subject relates herself and psychoanalysis calls objects[1]—come to an end. We are finite, and all of us are... Continue Reading →
