Christopher Bollas

A Contemporary Introduction

Steven Jaron

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780367819552
• eBook ISBN: 9781000562149
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This book provides a clear and accessible overview of the seminal clinical thinking of Christopher Bollas.

Placing Bollas's writings besides those of analysts including Milner, Bion, Winnicott, Lacan, and Green, Steven Jaron examines the central concept of the unthought known in terms of unconscious communication in the primary environment while occasioning a reworking of Oedipal configurations. Through vivid narratives of character analyzing a range of adult patients, at times requiring a rethinking of the conventional psychoanalytic frame, Jaron offers a fresh perspective on Bollas in arguing for the importance of considering not only the patient's self experience but also the psychoanalyst's.

This important study will be rewarding to beginning and seasoned analysts alike, offering suggestions for using Bollas' work in the consulting room as well as when faced with the demands of civic life today.

Chapter 1 A Psychoanalytic Epistemology The Unthought Known

DOI: 10.4324/9781003010999-2

1. Historical and Conceptual Considerations

It is a curious expression. By its seeming instability, the unthought known might catch readers by surprise. Some might find it baffling or even willingly provocative. What is known? Why, and in what way, is it unthought? And what of the conjoining of the two words? Can something be known and unthought at the same time? Or rather are they in some way opposed to each other? Used together, the words suggest an uncanny quality; they are at once familiar and strange, ordinary and uncommon.

And yet despite the expression’s enigmatic appearance, as a feature of the human mind, the unthought known exists as part of the ego’s implicit, concealed logic—its unconscious necessities and desires, its inherent, idiosyncratic ways characteristic of being—which come into place in the course of early object relating and the experience of life. A psychoanalytic investigation may reveal its dim vestiges to consciousness. It seems unlikely that an individual would ever become aware of its presence in the mind without the therapeutic method initiated by Freud as a way of bringing unconscious content and processes to light with the aim of helping the patient overcome neurotic symptoms. What does Christopher Bollas mean by the unthought known? This introduction seeks to account for his key metapsychological concept.

A historical investigation is helpful. One finds something of it in and around the time Bollas was writing his first developed psychoanalytic essays in the early and middle 1970s. The coalescing of what is knowable or unknowable and what is thinkable or unthinkable within the psychic apparatus as a distinctly psychoanalytic epistemology is apparent, for instance, in André Green’s review of Bion’s Attention and Interpretation A Scientific Approach to Insight in Psycho-Analysis and Groups (1970):

Sensualization of objects was implemented through the experiences of realization but the space involved also encompasses any experience of non-realization which can only be thought. Bion writes: ‘I am thus postulating mental space as a thing in itself that is unknowable, but that can be represented by thoughts.’

(Green 1973, p. 117; emphasis added)

Something akin is also found in ‘Slouching towards Bethlehem’ … or Thinking the Unthinkable in Psychoanalysis,’ an essay by Nina Coltart, like Bollas, an Independent psychoanalyst, in which she writes:

each hour with each patient is … in its way an act of faith; faith in ourselves, in the process, and faith in the secret, unknown, unthinkable things in our patients which, in the space which is the analysis, are slouching towards the time when their hour comes at last.

(Coltart 1985, p. 187, emphasis added; see also Bollas 2021a)

Perhaps a premise of the unthought known comes into the literature even earlier. In a manner of speaking it runs through parts of Marion Milner’s A Life of One’s Own (a pre-psychoanalytic work from 1934 written under the pseudonym, Joanna Field) in which, in the course of her search for the ‘facts’ of her life, Milner differentiates between ‘deliberate’ thoughts and ‘automatic’ thoughts (Milner 1934, p. 51), the former actively sought after while about the latter she asks: ‘Might not these apparent beliefs of my automatic self, although I had no notion of their existence, possess the power to influence my feelings and actions?’ (Milner 1934, p. 57). While not identical with the unthought known, that which presents itself as a belief arising spontaneously in feelings and actions could well be considered similar to Bollas’s concept.

He theorised the conjunction of the unknown or known and what is unthought or thought within the psyche in terms that are entirely his own. This began in The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known. The subtitle indicates that the unthought known is the book’s underlying epistemic principle and yet, while it appears here and there in relation to other notions such as aesthetic experience (1987, p. 32), a living, vital moment experienced beyond its cognitive or moral facets (1978, p. 385), Bollas does not discuss it in depth in any of the essays comprising the volume, as he does, for example, the transformational object (1987, p. 13–29). He establishes the idea in the brief introduction, written après-coup, which is thereby at once proscriptive and retroscriptive: the opening pages simultaneously anticipate what is to come and return backwards over that which had been presented even while he goes back to it in the epilogue, ‘The Unthought Known: Early Considerations.’ Something similar occurs in Bion’s Attention and Interpretation in which the first of the keywords making up the first part of the title hardly appears in the book while the second is conceived of indirectly. In fact, commenting on this particularity in his review, André Green surmised that:

the person responsible for the interpretation … must do away with the feeling of kinship he might be tempted to establish between himself and the object of his interpretation. To achieve this, he must free himself from his illusory possessions … in order to meet with a more open frame of mind what he will be faced with as intrinsically unknown.

(Green 1973, p. 115; emphasis added)

In a way similar to Bion’s sometimes lapidary reflections on negative capability—the concept is not extensively formulated but rather only suggestively sketched out in the final chapter through his quotation of Keats’s December 21, 1817 letter to his brothers, from which Bion derives the psychoanalytic concept—one might consider the formulation of the unthought known as something of an afterthought, as an un- or underdeveloped conclusion. This, however, would be a mistake. Insofar as it is a suspended culmination, it is a highly meaningful one because it opens up the psychoanalytic field onto something that was, till then, unidentified and, as such, unnamed.

Readers readily recognise that the book’s title—The Shadow of the Object—alludes to a passage from Freud’s ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ which, moreover, Bollas quotes in the exergue. In 1915, Freud was writing of object-loss among the bereft who are unable to undergo a work of mourning in which the object-cathexis gradually weakens, which would make a cathexis in a new object possible. Rather, such individuals are inexorably and painfully locked within the confines of their own loss, and in Freud’s portentous words, ‘the shadow of the object fell upon the ego, and the latter could henceforth be judged by a special agency, as though it were an object, the forsaken object’ (quoted in Bollas 1987, p. xi). The subject’s intense and long-lasting cathexis in the lost object, which forms in normal or ordinary circumstances the object of mourning, turns against the individual and punishes or afflicts him or her violently; in such cases, object-loss becomes pathological. This, then, is what Freud means by the object casting its shadow on the ego. But nowhere in his first book does Christopher Bollas discuss melancholia in specifically Freudian terms. Mourning, moreover, only comes into the picture in the case of George, engaged in ‘anticipatory mourning’ (1987, p. 107) or in his discussion of extractive introjection, which involves a loss of a part of the self through psychic theft (1987, p. 166) and induces a ‘paranoid state’ of mourning (1987, p. 168). No, he is clearly moving in a different direction from Freud. What he brings to light and describes departs from Freudian insights on object-loss and its effects on the ego. How then does his understanding differ? In essence, Bollas considers how the shadow of the primary object falls on the infant, and in this connection it belongs to the realm of the transformational object. What might be considered a misreading of Freud is, in fact, it is ‘a piece of radical mischief.’

At least two earlier developments made this wilful demarcating possible. The first is Bion’s theory of proto-thinking about which, Bion writes, ‘The mother’s capacity for reverie is the receptor organ for the infant’s harvest of self-sensation gained by its conscious’ (Bion 1962b, p. 158). Here, the infant relates according to the breast’s spectrum of primitive qualities, from good to bad, which determines how he or she will develop intrapsychically. The second is Winnicott’s reflections on the use of the object: ‘the object, if it is to be used, must necessarily be real in the sense of being part of shared reality, not a bundle of projections’ (Winnicott 1969, p. 88). For Winnicott, the capacity to use an object is not ‘inborn’ (his word) but rather the result of the quality of the object within the facilitating environment. This does not contradict his definition of the true self as ‘the inherited potential which is experiencing a continuity of being, and acquiring in its own way and at its own speed a personal psychic reality and a personal body scheme’ (Winnicott 1960, p. 46), a definition Bollas refers to as he builds his own theory of the true self (e.g., 1989a, p. 8) and which moreover has roots in Freud’s thoughts on the interrelation of what is innate and what is learned (Freud 1912a, p. 99 note 2). For both Bion and Winnicott, the psychic processes described occur in the life of the infant in relation to the maternal object. In Bollas’s terms, early self qualities emerge or do not emerge or only partially emerge while experiencing the transformational object, yet they are nevertheless present as an inherited disposition at birth. Afterwards, if the individual goes into psychoanalysis, the traces of the early object relation will express itself in the transferential–countertransferential dynamic (Freud’s word, which he uses specifically in speaking of transference, is Dynamik [Freud 1912a]; I take it up in reference to the Freudian pair).

Here is an initial statement about the unthought known in relation to the transformational object and, later, the psychoanalytic process:

The object can cast its shadow without a child being able to process this relation through mental representations or language, as, for example, when a parent uses his child to contain projective identifications. While we do know something of the character of the object which affects us, we may not have thought it yet. The work of a clinical psychoanalysis, particularly of object relations in the transference and the countertransference, will partly be preoccupied with the emergence into thought of early memories of being and relating.

(1987, p. 3; emphasis in the original)

Bollas refers to the period before the child attains sufficient language competency, that is, in general, before the age of two, as that during which the unthought known is organised in relation to the transformational object, the primary object. He considers it as a part of the primary repressed unconscious. Memory traces of sensations and events, sometimes traumatic, are retained in a partial or sometimes distorted or disguised form in the primary repressed unconscious and are later expressed in dreams and through screen memories. Or in how the analysand addresses the analyst in the transference, including in the affective qualities of his or her language use (affection, fear, misunderstanding, surprise, hatred and so on) or through exuding a mood (1987, p. 99f). Critically, these actual mnemic states cannot be thought of because their inscription in the unconscious is preverbal. In this regard, Sarah Nettleton writes that the unthought known ‘refers to the infant’s unconscious, learned assumptions about the nature of reality, based fundamentally on experiences that register in the mind before the advent of language’ (Nettleton 2017, p. 27).

A different kind of unthought known further exists. Forgotten infantile experiences—unthought yet known memories—from the learning period before the age of approximately five years become part of the received unconscious. The unthought known is the unconscious vehicle by which these experiences are conveyed into adulthood: ‘it may permeate a person’s being, and is articulated through assumptions about the nature of being and relating’ (1987, p. 246). The analysand is not merely scarcely aware of these fundamental assumptions but rather fully unconscious of them, even while these assumptions have become the nescient template upon which his or her life has nevertheless been organised. In brief, they constitute the mind’s unwitting, underlying principles of feeling and thinking, of being and relating.

Bollas’s most complete definition of the unthought known is not found in the introduction and epilogue to The Shadow of the Object but in the next book, Forces of Destiny. It is as if he needed to enlarge upon what was not especially developed earlier, all the while acknowledging it as the guiding principle. ‘That inherited set of dispositions that constitutes the true self,’ he writes:

is a form of knowledge which has obviously not been thought, even though it is ‘there’ already at work in the life of the neonate who brings this knowledge with him as he perceives, organises, remembers and uses his object world. I have termed this form of knowledge [in The Shadow of the Object] the unthought known to specify, amongst other things, the dispositional knowledge of the true self. More complex than an animal’s instinct, which is another manifestation of an unthought knowledge, how much of this knowledge is ever to be employed and brought into the subject’s being depends entirely on the nature of this child’s experience of the mother and the father. If the mother and the father have a good intuitive sense of their infant, so that their perception of his needs, presentation of objects for his ‘use,’ and representation of the infant (in the face, body gestures and language) are sensitive to his personality idiom, then he will experience the object world as facilitating. When this happens, we have children who take joy in re-presenting themselves, celebrating the arts of transformation because they have experienced transformative mothering and fathering and know from the authority of inner experiencing that latent knowledge can be given its life.

(1989a, p. 9)

Bollas suggests that what is inherited not only physiologically but also in terms of idiom is related to what Freud described, in ‘The Unconscious’ (1915b, p. 180f), as the primary repressed unconscious. The murmuring elements of this inheritance are ‘ancestral idioms’ and ‘infants, at birth, are in possession of a personality potential that is in part genetically sponsored and that this true self, over the course of a lifetime, seeks to express and elaborate this potential through formations in being and relating’ (1989a, p. 10).

In writing of the true self, Bollas is naturally thinking of Winnicott. In some ways, he develops his concept of the unthought known (those assumptions arising out of the child’s upbringing) as built on a predisposed inheritance (the true self) but in one basic way he disagrees with Winnicott...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 A Psychoanalytic Epistemology: The Unthought Known
• 2 Idiom, Character and Musical Objects: ‘Who, if I Cried’
• 3 Hysteria: Insufferable Pain
• 4 Schizophrenia: The Elephant and the Orphan Child
• 5 Self Experience in a Covidian Dream
• 6 Psychic Transformations: Air Hunger
• Bibliography
• Index