Preface to The Freudian Moment by Christopher Bollas
By Amnéris Maroni
Christopher Bollas is a seminal author, his first major book, The Shadow of the Object — Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known1(1987)—already pointed out what his emotional research universe would be. And yet, some themes in that book would undergo some shifts and inflections over the years.
The Freudian Moment, first published in 2007, a volume composed of interviews, essays, and lectures transcriptions, is in many ways one of his main metapsychological books. In this book, remarkable contributions were made concerning the unconscious thinking and articulation, and the new concept called perceptive identification, which establishes a new relationship with objects of perception, which is also a visceral criticism of what the author calls the ‘theocracy of consciousness’, a re-valuation of free association; finally,
this book contains a rethinking of his theoretical contributions that had begun twenty years earlier.
Vincenzo Bonaminio, from the Italian Psychoanalytic Society, interviews Bollas in 2006, at the invitation of the European Psychoanalytic Federation (EPF), for the Athens Conference, giving rise to two essays “Psychic Transformations” and “Articulations of the Unconscious”. In the first, we have news of the thought-provoking title of the book that the reader now has in hands. For thousands of years, people have sought and yearned to understand their dreams and keep a dialogue with one another in this regard. If we bear in mind the teachings of W. R. Bion, there was an unconscious phylogenetic preconception that was not realized. Sigmund Freud, by listening to and interpreting dreams, realizes this unconscious preconception and takes steps towards the construction of psychoanalysis. Bollas thus interprets what he calls the “Freudian moment”, a moment that we could say that it is not over yet! Accordingly, psychoanalysis is read as an unconscious preconception, which Freud performs, and which waits, as an area of knowledge, for new conceptions to be incorporated into such realization. That is the perspective from which Bollas reads the writings of Melanie Klein, Jacques Lacan, Donald Winnicott, W. R. Bion. That is to say, this is Bollas’ way of understanding the history of psychoanalysis and its field of differentiations through the psychoanalytic movement.
Bollas graduated at the British Psychoanalytical Society, studying in the so-called “Middle Group”. This group, with important names in psychoanalysis, including Donald Winnicott, Michel Balint, Massud Khan and others, is known for its theoretical independence and for maintaining a critical position in relation to what became known as the “war between schools” of psychoanalysis. Bollas takes that group’s position to its ultimate consequences, to the point of claiming that the “war between the schools”, with its charismatic leaders and groups formed around them, prevents the development of the psychoanalytic knowledge, the differentiated flourishing of the area. As a response to that, Bollas advocates for a pluralist approach, a pluralist ethics in psychoanalysis and, for that purpose, it is necessary to answer the question ‘What is Theory?’ — one of the lectures transcripts included in this important book.
This question is quite controversial in psychoanalysis. Currently, there are many who deny the war and claim that it did exist, but it is over now. For these psychoanalysts, what they call drive paradigm (Freud) and object paradigm (Sandor Ferenczi, M. Balint, D. Winnicott, WRD Fairbairn and C. Bollas himself) found, in great authors, a way of creative intellectual coexistence, an integration. Hence, the war between the schools would be in the past2.
Bollas does not think so and maintains his criticism of the war between schools and the paralysis that this “intellectual genocide”, in his words, causes in the psychoanalytic field. A lecture, ‘What is theory?’, given in November 2006, at the annual conference of the International Federation of Pychoanalytic Education (IFPE), California, and which is also part of The Freudian Moment, ingeniously offers a solution to such war between schools, a solution laborious it is true, but powerful and democratic.
In this lecture, Bollas let us to understand how the English empiricist tradition and the American pragmatic standpoint has influenced him. The theory is perspectivist: “each of the different theories of the psychoanalytic experience constitutes a different category of perception”: “one theory sees things that other theories do not see”, he says. As an unconscious perception, a theory constitutes a psychic view of the world. We inhabit a theoretical stance; we, psychoanalysts, dwell in it and therefore, this space can be limited or wide. By internalizing various perceptions, various psychoanalytic theories, various worldviews, we expand our living space. With them, with these lenses/theories, we transform our patients. A pluralist, Bollas appreciates psychoanalytic theories/practices in a completely different way; all of them, each one of them, provides us a different access point to the psychic world. It implies that there is indeed a difference in listening when one has a single accessible lens/school and when one has several lenses/schools internalized by the psychoanalyst. Instead of proposing the integration of paradigms and schools, Bollas’ perspectivism supports difference and it is in this difference that resides the possibility of a certain clinical wisdom. Such theoretical democracy would not be crippling as psychoanalysts could continue to carry out their unconscious preconceptions, without all energy being pointlessly shifted to war and ‘intellectual genocide’.
The last major ‘displacement’ offered by Bollas in this book is in the essay “The Interpretation of Transference as a Resistance to Free Association” — selected by the German Psychoanalytical Association as an object of debate at the Annual Conference, in March 2007. In it we find a radical critique of the excess of psychoanalytic technique, in particular the interpretation of the transference in the here and now. Free association is reinterpreted from the Analytical Pair or Freudian Pair as being, so to speak, the rescue of the transference that really matters. In this unique object relation that only takes place in the clinic, the analyst listens in a state of uniformly fluctuating attention — trying not to focus on anything specifically, remember or anticipate anything — while the analysand free associates. One speaks, the other listens. Existing mental positions in each of us, which in this object relation unfolds between analyst and analysand, greatly facilitates the relationship between unconscious minds. The critique of transference — particularly aiming at the Kleinian one — and the shift to free association allow Bollas to make another notable inflection at the beginning of the 21st century: the fostering of unconscious growth as a goal of free association and, therefore, of analysis. It also allows the critique of what he calls the ‘theocracy of conscience’.
NOTES:
Why Bollas ? 