Christopher Bollas is a British

United Kingdom

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...

 psychoanalyst

Psychoanalysis

Psychoanalysis is a psychological theory developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud. Psychoanalysis has expanded, been criticized and developed in different directions, mostly by some of Freud's former students, such as Alfred Adler and Carl Gustav...

 and writer.

Early life and education

Bollas grew up in Laguna Beach, California

Laguna Beach, California

Laguna Beach is a seaside resort city and artist community located in southern Orange County, California, United States, approximately southwest of the county seat of Santa Ana...

 and later graduated in history from UC Berkeley. As an undergraduate Bollas studied intellectual history with Carl Schorske, psychoanalytical anthropology with Alan Dundes

Alan Dundes

Alan Dundes, was a folklorist at the University of California, Berkeley. His work was said to have been central to establishing the study of folklore as an academic discipline. He wrote 12 books, both academic and popular, and edited or co-wrote two dozen more...

, and psychoanalytic critical theory with Frederick Crews. At Buffao he studied with Norman Holland, Leslie Fiedler

Leslie Fiedler

Leslie Aaron Fiedler was a Jewish-American literary critic, known for his interest in mythography and his championing of genre fiction. His work also involves application of psychological theories to American literature. He was in practical terms one of the early postmodernist critics working...

, Murray Schwartz, Michel Foucault

Michel Foucault

Michel Foucault , born Paul-Michel Foucault , was a French philosopher, social theorist and historian of ideas...

, Rene Girard

René Girard

René Girard is a French historian, literary critic, and philosopher of social science. His work belongs to the tradition of anthropological philosophy...

 and with the Heideggerian psychoanalyts Heinz Lichtenstein. Eric Erikson became a mentor early on in his career and was to be of singular influence for the next twenty years. Those teachers and figures whom he knew and who helped diversify his thinking were Arnold Modell

Arnold Modell

Arnold Modell is a clinical professor of social psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School and a supervising and training analyst at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute. He received his bachelor's degree from Columbia College in 1945...

, John Bowlby

John Bowlby

Edward John Mostyn "John" Bowlby was a British psychologist, psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, notable for his interest in child development and for his pioneering work in attachment theory.- Family background :...

, Andre Green

André Green

André Green is a French psychoanalyst of global renown.'Among contemporary practitioners, Andre Green...epitomizes an international spirit of independence'.-Life and career:...

, Herbert Rosenfeld

Herbert Rosenfeld

Herbert Alexander Rosenfeld was a British psychoanalyst, who was born in Germany in 1910 and died in London in 1986.'British analysts have been deeply influenced by the work and teachings of Rosenfeld who increasingly focused upon the analyst's contribution to what was happening in the analysis -...

, Joseph Sandler

Joseph Sandler

Joseph Sandler is a Washington, D.C. attorney who served as in-house general counsel for the Democratic National Committee from 1993 to 1998 and continued in this role at his firm Sandler, Reiff & Young through 2009...

, J.-B. Pontalis, Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel

Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel

Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel was a leading French psychoanalyst, a training analyst, and past President of the Société psychanalytique de Paris in France. From 1983 to 1989, she was Vice President of the International Psychoanalytical Association...

, Marion Milner

Marion Milner

Marion Milner , sometimes known as Marion Blackett-Milner, was a British author and psychoanalyst. Outside psychotherapeutic circles, she is better known by her pseudonym, Joanna Field, as a pioneer of introspective journaling.-Biography:...

, and Paula Heimann. Bollas earned a Ph.D in English literature from the niversity of Buffalo].

Career

Bollas was a Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts

University of Massachusetts

This article relates to the statewide university system. For the flagship campus often referred to as "UMass", see University of Massachusetts Amherst...

 in the middle 1980’s. Concordant with his career in literary and cultural studies, Bollas has worked as a psychotherapist since 1967, launching his clinical career with autistic and schizophrenic children. He qualified in psychoanalysis from the Institute of Psychoanalysis in London in 1977 and in psychotherapy at the Tavistock Clinic

Tavistock Clinic

The in London was founded in 1920 by Dr. Hugh Crichton-Miller, a psychiatrist who developed psychological treatments for shell-shocked soldiers during and after the First World War. The clinic's first patient was, however, a child. Its clinical services were always, therefore, for both children...

 in 1978. He was the first Honorary Non Medical Consultant at the London Clinic of Psychoanalysis, Visiting Professor in Psychoanalysis at the Istituto di Neuropsychiatria Infantile of the University of Rome from 1978 to 1998, Director of Education at the Austen Riggs Center

Austen Riggs Center

The Austen Riggs Center is a psychiatric treatment facility founded in 1913 in Stockbridge, Massachusetts.-Founding – 1946:A New York City internist who repaired to the bucolic countryside of Stockbridge while suffering from tuberculosis, Austen Fox Riggs developed an innovative treatment regimen...

 from 1985-1988. He became a British citizen in 2010.

Contributions

Bollas is most widely known for his psychoanalytical writings and some of his ideas have had a wide dissemination; indeed, he is one of the most widely-read authors in the field of psychoanalysis. His theory of “the unthought known”—that as infants we are informed by many ideas conveyed through action rather than thinking that become part of our unconscious—has been of particular significance, although other concepts “the transformational object”, “violent innocence”, “extractive introjection”, “ psychic genera and the receptive unconscious” and “ human idiom” have been widely influential in the clinical field.

In the middle 1990s in Being A Character (1992) and Cracking UP (1995) Bollas turned back to Freud’s early writing—especially The Interpretation of Dreams—and argued that Freud’s writing implicitly assumed a theory of unconscious perception, organization, and creativity that Bollas integrated and used in his own radical return to Freud, arguing that psychoanalysis is primarily efficacious due to entirely unconscious processes of change. In the 21st century, in Free Association, The Evocative Object World, and The Infinite Question, Bollas revived Freud’s marginalized theory of free association providing evidence of how and in what ways all people think associatively, revealing—as Freud argued—through the “chain of ideas”, or simply how the way people move from one topic to another reveals unconscious processes of thought. However, Bollas has distanced himself from the Freudian movement

Aside from his clinical writings Bollas is also a cultural critic and his writings have earned the interests of people outside the world of psychoanalysis, He has also written three comic novels—Dark at the End of the Tunnel, I Have Heard the Mermaids Singing, and Mayhem—and five plays.

An American television sitcom Cracking Up

Cracking Up

For the movie, see Cracking Up .Cracking Up is an American television sitcom created by School of Rock writer Mike White, who also served as the series' head writer. It aired on the Fox Network on Monday nights from March to May 2004. The title of the program and the name of the psychiatrist, Dr...

derived its title from his book with that title and included a main character, Dr. Bollas, played by Henry Gibson

Henry Gibson

Henry Gibson was an American actor and songwriter, best known as a cast member of Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In and for his recurring role as Judge Clark Brown on Boston Legal.-Early life:...

. Bollas is also the only psychoanalyst mentioned in the first series of HBO's In Treatment

In Treatment

In Treatment is an American HBO drama, produced and developed by Rodrigo Garcia, about a psychologist, 50-something Dr. Paul Weston, and his weekly sessions with patients, as well as those with his own therapist at the end of the week. The program, which stars Gabriel Byrne as Paul, debuted on...

.

Nonfiction

• The Shadow of the Object (1987 Free Association Books: 1989 Columbia University Press )
• Being a Character (1992, Routledge)
• Forces of Destiny (1996 Free Association Books)
• The New Informants (1996 with Jason Aronson)
• The Mystery of Things (1999 Routledge)
• Hysteria (1999 Routledge)
• Free Association (2002 Ikon Books)
• Cracking Up (2003 Routledge)
• The Freudian Moment (2007 Karnac Books)
• The Evocative Object World (2008 Routledge)
• The Infinite Question (2009, Routledge)
• The Christopher Bollas Reader (2011, Routledge)

Fiction and plays

• Dark at the End of the Tunnel (2004 Free Association Books)
• I Have Heard the Mermaids Singing (2005 Free Association Books)
• Theraplay and Other Plays (2005 Free Association Books)
• Mayhem (2005, Free Associations Books)

Works about Christopher Bollas

• The Vitality of Objects ed. Joseph Scalia (2002, Continuum)
• The Independent Mind in British Psychoanalysis Eric Rayner, (1991, Aronson)