New Books In Psychoanalysis

In his second visit with New Books in Psychoanalysis, Christopher Bollas elucidates his thinking about schizophrenia. But he also does more than that; because his beginnings as a clinician are intimately intertwined with the treatment of psychosis, the ways in which this early exposure colors all of his clinical thinking becomes apparent. Indeed, in psychoanalysis we could say that there are two kinds of clinicians–those who treat psychosis and those who don’t. Bollas is clearly in the former camp. One wonders, given the centrality of psychosis in his theoretical work, if he would have been drawn to analytic work had he not started with the most primitive of human experiences? We meet him as an undergraduate at UC Berkeley, studying history, working at a program for autistic and psychotic children presumably to pay the bills. We follow him to SUNY-Buffalo where, while pursuing his PhD in literature, he encounters psychotic students in a class he is teaching, walks across the campus to the clinic, asks if he