Bollas and Psychoanalysis of Aesthetics
Review of "The Metapsychology of Christopher Bollas" (Sarah Nettleton, Escuta: 2019, 151p.)
“Only rarely does the psychoanalyst feel impelled to engage in aes-thetic investigations”, writes Freud in the first lines of his obscure The uncanny (Freud, 1919/2010). Had he known the work of Christopher Bollas, he would be surprised at the contributions resulting from paying heed to the form behind the content.
The extensive work of this American psychoanalyst based in London is full of references to art, literature and music. For him, artistic/aesthetic creativity itself coincides with unconscious thinking (which forms the dream).
In The Metapsychology of Christopher Bollas, translated and published in Brazil by Escuta, the author Sarah Nettleton, English psychoanalyst, former supervisee and editor of Bollas’ most recent books, takes us through a sharp and penetrating examination of his work. Hers is not too an extensive and detailed interpretation but rather an elaborate intake of what is most fundamental in the Bollasian clinical experience and perceptions; Sarah’s focus seems to be to instrumentalize the reader in navigation through a plural metapsychology that starts with Freud and is influenced by Winnicott, Bion, Lacan, but which also permeates and even abandons those authors in favor of a renewed attention to the aesthetics of the self. In Sarah’s reading, Bollas teaches that the tripartite structure does not allow us to think about all of our internal negotiations.
The author highlights the Bollasian concept of receptive unconscious as being the foundation of his work. Bollas writes that, had Freud invented the telescope, he would have been more interested in the discoveries enabled by his new device – free association – than in the device itself. Free association is a direct child of interpretation of dreams and the investigation of how the unconscious mind works. Bollas focuses on this part of Freud’s discovery, underlining the unconscious intelligence that scans the world in search of objects to be used as remains of the day in the communication through dreams. This capacity is the receptive unconscious that coexists alongside the repressed unconscious but which, in contrast to the latter, as in a two-way street, acts as an attracting force to objects of the world with which the aesthetics of each subject can identify. Deeply grounded in the clinic (his books are filled with vignettes), Bollas calls upon us to think about the choices of objects not only as projective identifications, but also as perceptual identifications, that is to say, the self’s capacity to be affected by objects, not that of an ego that projects internal elements onto outside objects.
By expanding Winnicott’s speculation that the mind tends toward health, Bollas thinks of genera as being pairs opposed to trauma. The latter would collect tannic objects in the world to increase the traumatic core; the genera, in turn, would collect evocative or conservative objects (phrases by the author, unraveled by Nettleton) that serve for the self to unfold and appear in the internal and external worlds.
In Sarah’s reading, the bet on a robust self is the greatest distinction between Bollas and Winnicott. While the latter linked the self to the id, fragile and protected by the false adapted self, Bollas thinks of the self as being connected to the ego, more powerful and insistent than the Winnicottian self. The self is the seat of what Bollas calls human idiom, the unique fingerprint we are all born with, and which wants to unfold, from the cradle to the grave.
Sarah details how, for Bollas, this ‘unique design’ of each subject entwines the libido and places us in an unique creative engagement with the objects of the world. Creative and – again – aesthetic. Therefore, form is as important, or more so than content. While breastfeeding, the baby soaks up more than milk: an aesthetic, a processuality; it experiences the mother as a transformative process, not as an object. The decanting of this processuality (which unites the baby’s idiom with the maternal reception and transformation) generates something known but which cannot be thought of yet. It is the Bollasian unthought known, the founding structure of the self and perhaps of the very work of Bollas.
The processuality of the relationship with the mother is the basis for the emergence of the fingerprint, of the personal idiom, of the true self – of this mysterious point that constitutes us. “To achieve the basic trust,” writes Sarah, “the infant needs to feel not only that his instinctual urges are contained, but also that his idiom, his unique subjectivity, is perceived, recognized and welcomed” (p. 41). In embracing and celebrating the baby’s idiomatic productions, the mother is perceived as a positive process of transformation to the baby, a transformational object, another Bollasian concept that Sarah reminds us of. As adults, we look for other transformational objects in the world, including the analyst.
When welcome at this stage, the baby will have a positive perception of its idiom, and the self will gain confidence; the baby’s unconscious communication with himself, the intuitiveness and creativity will be free to explore the world throughout the baby’s life in search of objects with which, and through which the self can unfold. Analysis can be a reissuing of this transformational process.
When welcome at this stage, the baby will have a positive perception of its idiom, and the self will gain confidence; the baby’s unconscious communication with himself, the intuitiveness and creativity will be free to explore the world throughout the baby’s life in search of objects with which, and through which the self can unfold. Analysis can be a reissuing of this transformational process.
A great art lover, Bollas parts with other great authors regarding the importance of objects in the literal sense, physical objects. Nettleton reminds us that, unlike Melanie Klein, for whom objects were primarily internal (p. 71), Bollas radicalizes the idea that the perceptions of the object world are fundamental to the formation and functioning of the mind. Starting from the concept of personal idiom that scans the world in search of objects with which to identify and engage, Sarah reminds us of the importance Bollas attaches to objects in the world because of their integrity and intrinsic characteristics. The self’s vital intelligence seeks objects whose structure enables the former to unfold (rather than just passively be hit by remains of the day).
Nettleton underscores how he recounts the delights of visits to supermarkets and department stores in The Evocative Object World (2009). “Each section of the store, each part of the section, each unit of visual space, contains evocative objects. As we see them their designs elicits feelings within us. […] As to the unconscious registration of such objects, we can only assume that just as the store clusters like-objects in such units, our mind does such the same thing, with the salient exception that we add personal meaning to each and every one of the things we see” (Bollas, 2009, p.80). It is not by chance that the selection of objects is so important, given the estimation of generative objects, of perceptive identifications. In Bollas everything is plural (plural clinic, populated mind, infinite self, indeterminate self); the estimation of objects of the world completes the summary of his thoughts.
Nettleton helps us understand that for Bollas, we are a composite, an assemblage of ourselves; we live with the unconscious mind – unique and idiomatic – permanently searching the world for objects that we already are but don’t know we are. For him, intuition and creativity are an intra and trans psychic process, which occurs all the time, an unstoppable search for the self to tell us what thing has something to do with us, who we are.
After reading the book it is impossible for me not to remember the Brazilian artist Tunga, who once said that “we are a herd of ourselves”*. Refusing to admit phases for his work, in other words, always talking about one and the same thing throughout his long career, Tunga used to describe the creative process taking place in his workshop, which he calls psychoactive space, like this: “I’m always trying to learn, to be around what I evoke and what I stir up. I think this conjunction – being present before something and bringing something that’s not there to be joined together is a process of creation. So everything that’s here could turn out to be the work, or it may already be the work. I’ll tell you a story: this little piece you can see here is about nine years old. It has been near me, disfigured, for about four, five years, without my realizing that it was a work of art. It was just a piece of amber with a piece of transparent crystal that was placed there because I thought it had something in common. One day I looked at it and said: “Wow, the work is ready.” I had been near it for years, and what I was looking for was right by my side.”
Translated by
Deborah Freire
Deborah Freire
Originaly published in Portuguese in Jornal de Psicanálise - Instituto de Psicanálise "Durval Marcondes", Sociedade Brasileira de Psicanálise de São Paulo, Vol. 53, dezembro 2019, n.97.
Download dof the book "A Metapsicologia de Christopher Bollas" (Sarah Nettleton, Escuta: 2019, 151p.) (Portuguese)
*The quote can be found in an interview to Vice magazine at https://www.vice.com/pt_br/article/8q4av5/tunga-v2n10
REFERENCES
FREUD, S (1919). O Inquietante. In S. Freud, Obras Completas (P.C. Souza, Trad., Vol 14, pp. 328). São Paulo: Cia das Letras. (Published originally in 1919)
FREUD, S (1919). O Inquietante. In S. Freud, Obras Completas (P.C. Souza, Trad., Vol 14, pp. 328). São Paulo: Cia das Letras. (Published originally in 1919)
BOLLAS, C (2009). The Evocative Object World. Routhledge: London