The Metapsychology of Christopher Bollas

An Introduction

Sarah Nettleton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317635970
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

The Metapsychology of Christopher Bollas: An Introduction explores Bollas's extraordinarily wide contribution to contemporary psychoanalysis. The book aims to introduce and explain the fundamentals of Bollas's theory of the mind in a systematic way, addressing many of the questions that commonly arise when people approach his work.

Through chapters on topics such as the receptive subject, the creative unconscious and the implications of Bollas's metapsychology for the technique of free association, the book enables the reader to acquire an understanding of his unique psychoanalytic language, to grasp the conceptual building blocks of his thinking and how these interrelate, and to appreciate the theoretical and clinical coherence of his thinking.

The Metapsychology of Christopher Bollas: An Introduction will be of use to psychoanalysts, psychotherapists and counsellors, as well as psychiatrists, psychologists and social workers wishing to explore the applications of psychoanalytic thinking to their practice. It will be of great value to trainees in these disciplines, as well as to postgraduate students and academics interested in contemporary psychoanalysis.

Chapter 1
Psychic dualities

Underlying Bollas’s metapsychology there is a fundamental polarity between two broad principles. This duality manifests in many different ways, including:

maternal	paternal
form	content
merged	delineated
intuitive	conceptual
receptive	active

We encounter these two modes from birth (probably in some form even before birth) and both remain within us, moment-to-moment, as potential forms of being. The balance, and the tension, between them influence all aspects of our intrapsychic life and underpin our encounters with the external world.

Bollas frequently alludes explicitly to the duality of the maternal and paternal orders.

During the primary phase of life within the maternal dyad, unconscious axioms of being and relating are absorbed by the infant as he exists within the experience of the mother’s way of feeding, handling and relating to him.

As the child becomes verbal, and during the Oedipal phase, father, siblings, extended family and the wider world intervene and introduce him progressively to the existence of a reality outside the self, and to the objective structures and demands of society. He encounters the awareness of sexual difference, the primal scene and parental desire, the challenges of rivalry, and the need to communicate using a shared language. This is life governed by the paternal order, which first announces itself in visceral ways that Bollas describes as follows:

the “textural” difference of the father from the mother, or the “feel” of the father: the father who embodies a different odor, a different smell, who has a different way of holding, of carrying the child; who has a different way of breathing, of walking, a different tone of voice. ¹

Both at a sensory level and in the realm of thought and imagination, the duality embodied by the idiosyncrasies of maternal and paternal care forms a template for the existence of two distinct categories of experience.

Bollas describes the way in which maternal and paternal functioning come together in the psychoanalytic session with the process of recounting a dream. Whereas the dream is dreamt within a private, hallucinatory world, its reporting involves the dreamer in the attempt to capture it in words. The patient is asked to transform something private, evocative and imbued with emotional subtlety into a verbal communication with an external other. However, Bollas points out that the psychoanalytic approach to understanding a dream involves both modes of experience:

the requirement is remarkably laid-back: simply say what is on the mind in association to the dream. The analyst does not interrogate the patient or demand that the patient make sense of the dream. Instead the patient lingers with the dream text, borrowing from its form, and talking without knowing much of what this means, rather like the dreamer inside his or her own dream. But as time passes and the analysand follows different lines of thought, the unity of the dream seems to break down and the associations take the dreamer very far away from the dream experience […] That oracular aspect of the dream – the maternal oracle that held the dreamer inside it, spoke in the dreamer’s ear, brought visionary events before the dreamer’s very eyes – is displaced by the dreamer’s own mental life. ²

Although the externalising process of conveying the dream in words can be understood to represent the intrusion of paternal demands into the maternal idyll, Bollas considers that the analysis of the dream ‘accomplishes a mature pairing of the internal mother and father, and leads to an unconscious integration of the maternal and paternal orders in the analysand’. ³

In his book China on the Mind he explores this duality on a grand scale, in terms of the contrast, both of culture and of intrapsychic structuring, between Eastern and Western traditions.

Western language and thought are characterised by delineated parts of speech with different functions, making a clear distinction between subject and object and allowing precision and organisation. They are governed, therefore, by the paternal order. Eastern civilisations, and specifically those branching out from Ancient China, are rooted by their spoken and written language in the holistic and the maternal. The Chinese character consists of a pictorial cluster of associations that combine to convey inherently complex meanings that will resonate differently for each person. Bollas writes:

Eastern discourse is ambiguous, allowing for communication to be co-constructed, whereas Western discourse favours lucidity and a clear distinction between speaker and recipient. The message is thus an indicator of difference, an act that separates and demarcates people from one another. ⁴

Western thinking is causal, metonymic, diachronic; Eastern thinking is correlative, metaphoric, synchronic. ‘The Chinese examined the world in the differing forms of its process, rather than in its substantive differences.’ ⁵

Whereas early Western literary texts were concerned with the adventures of the individual in the external world, the East focused on evanes-cent moments of ordinary life, and the connection between the inner self and the universal soul of man. Western heroism is set against Eastern introspection and transcendence:

Both East and West regard human life as a journey, but they differ in their understanding of this. The Western mind explores the material world, discovering new evidence in a never-ending journey that honours its adventurers, who are identified with the found. The emphasis is on a venture that penetrates the real, analyzes and organizes it, and presumes to add to the pool of knowledge. The Eastern mind explores the spiritual world, discovering new internal positions that a self can take in order to instantiate through heightened consciousness ever more inspired forms of the immanental. ⁶

During this exploration of Bollas’s metapsychology we shall encounter these dualities repeatedly, represented by various pairs of concepts: the repressed and the receptive unconscious, psychic genera and psychic trauma, focus and dissemination, self presentation and self representation, subjective and objective modes of thought, and the significance for our clinical understanding of the interplay between form and content.

Notes

1 Molino, A. (ed.) (1997) Freely Associated: Encounters in Psychoanalysis. London: Free Association Books, p.21.

2 Bollas, C. ‘Free association’, EOW p.44.

3 Bollas, C. ‘Psychic transformations’, FM p.10 (original italics).

4 Bollas, C. China on the Mind, p.4.

5 Ibid.

6 Ibid., p.6.

Chapter 2
The receptive unconscious and psychic genera

Key papers

• ‘What is theory?’ (FM)
• ‘Psychic genera’ (BC)
• ‘Psychic transformations’ (FM)
• ‘Articulations of the unconscious’ (FM)

Key concepts: repression and receptivity; unconscious perception, unconscious creativity and unconscious communication; the receptive unconscious; psychic genera

In the current political climate, the psychoanalytic profession is increasingly called upon to define itself, and one of the ways in which it may seek to do this is by claiming a unique therapeutic concern with the unconscious.

But the question arises: what sort of unconscious do we mean? How do we imagine the unconscious, and the role it plays in the structure and functioning of the mind? This question may threaten one of the few areas of assumed cohesion in the psychoanalytic world, but it has crucial implications for our understanding of all aspects of psychoanalysis: its theories, its clinical approaches and its therapeutic aims.

In this chapter we shall explore Bollas’s theory of the receptive unconscious, which is, in my view, the most comprehensive and coherent contribution to the psychoanalytic understanding of the unconscious mind since Freud.

In ‘What is theory?’ (FM), Bollas sets out his problem situation – his rationale for producing a new metapsychological model – and he highlights various anomalies in Freudian theory. Freud offered three entirely different theories about mental structure. His topographical model was a spatial metaphor: the psyche formed in layers, with the conscious mind on top, the preconscious in the middle, and the unconscious out of sight below the surface.

Where did this model come from, and what does it enable us to understand?

Freud’s early explorations in clinical psychoanalysis were centred around the problem of hysteria, and this led him to form a theory that privileged a certain aspect of mental functioning. In terms of psychic structure, he maintained in his early writings that the deepest, most fundamental part of the mind is the primary non-repressed unconscious, made up of the primitive physiological links between body and mind as well as our phylogenetic inheritance (nowadays we would probably call this our DNA). As the psyche develops, to this is added the repressed unconscious, consisting of material that has been banished from conscious awareness.

In Freud’s work with Breuer, he made the revolutionary discovery that hysterical conversion is caused by repression: traumatic ideas that are unacceptable to the ego are pushed down into the unconscious, allowed to reappear only if they are disguised, often in the form of somatic symptoms. In the course of psychoanalytic treatment what has been forgotten is restored to consciousness, and this brings relief from the build-up of internal pressure that produced the physical manifestation. For thinking about hysteria the topographical model is entirely appropriate, and it invites a clinical focus on the re-emergence of repressed contents.

This model proposed that both the activity and the contents of the unconscious mind were governed by the repression of forbidden thoughts. However, in 1923, in The Ego and the Id, Freud encountered a theoretical problem. He had previously maintained that the unconscious consisted of repressed ideas, but he now realised that the agency that does the repressing is itself unconscious. So how was the unconscious to be defined?

This led him to propose his structural theory – a completely different metapsychological metaphor. Whereas the earlier model has concrete, spatial implications, this has an anthropomorphic flavour: it involves three parts of the mind with very different characters – id, ego and superego. This theory enables psychoanalysts to conceptualise a range of new issues. In particular, it offers a way of thinking about intrapsychic conflict in terms of a dynamic struggle between three agencies with incompatible aims. It allows a symptom to be considered, not just as a reaction to repressed ideas, but as the r...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Psychic dualities
• 2 The receptive unconscious and psychic genera
• 3 Idiom
• 4 The unthought known
• 5 Self relationships
• 6 Character and interrelating
• 7 Evocative objects
• 8 Unconscious complexity
• 9 Free association
• 10 The Freudian Pair
• 11 Worlds apart
• 12 An integrated theory
• Appendix
• Index