That’s not little! Let me cite José Outeiral, who prefaced the Brazilian translation of Being a Character: “…the author, in a quite unusual way when it comes to psychoanalytic texts, allows himself to disclose his own intimacy-whenever necessary, as an invitation to reader do the same-in order to speak of experiences, not of patients, but of the man”.
Thus, Bollas gives us back that essential freedom of being our own source of discoveries and experiences. The grounding of his/her findings is the analyst and, if anything, psychoanalysis is a field of knowledge that doesn’t get along with neutrality however, that is not so common. The scientific atmosphere-including the psychoanalytical one-underlines the fact that the analyst is, so to speak, the grounding of his/her findings, whether by analyzing, or by being analyst, or by practicing auto analysis. What can be done, then? The epistemological naïveté is much more generalized than we can imagine!īollas behaves as Freud, Jung, and other major authors in the “psy field” did in the past and that’s something absolutely appealing to me, for, nowadays, we tend to read the psychoanalysts’ works in the same way we read the works of sociologists, doctors, or mathematicians. What we are still living-smell of positivism in the air! -it is something rather outdated. How relieved I felt by reading Bollas! It is unbearable for me the whole modern scientific discourse, which pretends to be neutral, that is, a discourse without body, without affection, without an author’s presence, despite the fact that there are many ways of doing science, of getting to know the reality. He also doesn’t hide himself when describing his way of being in order to vindicate his opinion and look into a certain theme he puts himself in his writing! Here’s one passage: “…I believe that it happens because, at certain moments, I need to conjure up my own self experience so that I can write about the topic-in order to be “informed from inside”, so to speak, instead of analyzing a particular stage in the speech with a patient…”. In this Introduction, I’m going to show five good reasons for the future readers of Christopher Bollas, mainly for the reading of Being a Character.įirst reason: Christopher Bollas doesn’t hesitate, throughout his entire work, in referring to meaningful passages in his own life, lived and forgotten memories, which were eventually retrieved as the writing process goes on. Now, they have become classical books in the field of psychoanalysis, and Being a Character is extraordinary! Moreover, my Jungian friends might appreciate these readings, in a quite pleasurable way, for Bollas is more radical than Jung, though they share many intuitions. I’m going to use particularly the first part of the book Being a Character (BOLLAS, 1998). Psychoanalysis and human idiom (1992), The Infinite Question (2012), The Freudian Moment (2013). Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known (1987), Forces of Destiny. He has written many books, and among them the following have already been published in Brazil: The Shadow of the Object. He is an American, but has a formation in the British Psychoanalytical Society. Nowadays, Bollas is one of the most outstanding and creative psychoanalysts in the world.
I’ll deal with three important books by Christopher Bollas in this text.
0 kommentar(er)
