Being a Character: Psychoanalysis and Self ExperienceBeing a Character: Psychoanalysis and Self Experience, Christopher Bollas

It is rare, indeed, to discover a voice among modern psychoanalysts that can portray and radically reconsider theoretical and clinical issues with such elegance that the reader is enthralled as he or she is taken into the very texture of the psychoanalytic process. Christopher Bollas is such a writer. In the first part of Being a Character, Bollas shows how, as 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 theory of dream work as a model for all unconscious thinking, Bollas argues that we dream work ourselves into becoming who we are, and he 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 ground, the latter part of the book describes very special kinds of self experience, including the tragic madness of women cutting themselves, the odd experience of a cruising homosexual in bars and baths, the demented ferocity of the Fascist state of mind, and every person's self experience as a member of his or her historical epoch. He includes a seminal chapter on the Oedipus Complex, eloquently arguing that Sophocles and Freud point to an entirely different resolution to the Oedipus Complex than heretofore argued in any of the schools of psychoanalytic thought.