The Evocative Object World

Author: Christopher Bollas
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134026560
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 159

Book Description
In The Evocative Object World Christopher Bollas builds on Freud's account of dream formation, combining it with perceptive clinical, theoretical and cultural insights to show how the psychoanalytical method can provide a rich understanding of what has traditionally been regarded as 'the outside world'. Moving from the fundamentals of the free associative technique, through an examination of how architecture and the built environment interact with individual and societal dream life, Bollas extends the work of psychoanalysis beyond relations with literature and culture to the actual objects which surround us. As with the evocative external structures of our environment, Bollas describes how the family, with its inherited genetic structures, likewise constitutes a pre-existent unconscious formation into which we are placed, and demonstrates that there is more to this multifaceted unit than the traditional psychoanalytical notion of the Oedipal triangle. In the process, Bollas also provides a fascinating and comprehensive review of how his own theories have evolved over the past three decades: a period during which, in his view, Western society has increasingly neglected – or even become actively hostile towards – unconscious life. Throughout this engaging and accessible text, Bollas rejects the simplistic notion that mental life is unconsciously determined. Instead he provides a compelling study of how unconscious life is shaped by a diverse array of both internal and external factors, and how the work of the Freudian pair provides the best means to gain insight into our dreams, our surroundings, our families – and our mental life as a whole.

Evocative Objects

Author: Sherry Turkle
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262516772
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 397

Book Description
Autobiographical essays, framed by two interpretive essays by the editor, describe the power of an object to evoke emotion and provoke thought: reflections on a cello, a laptop computer, a 1964 Ford Falcon, an apple, a mummy in a museum, and other "things-to-think-with." For Sherry Turkle, "We think with the objects we love; we love the objects we think with." In Evocative Objects, Turkle collects writings by scientists, humanists, artists, and designers that trace the power of everyday things. These essays reveal objects as emotional and intellectual companions that anchor memory, sustain relationships, and provoke new ideas.These days, scholars show new interest in the importance of the concrete. This volume's special contribution is its focus on everyday riches: the simplest of objects—an apple, a datebook, a laptop computer—are shown to bring philosophy down to earth. The poet contends, "No ideas but in things." The notion of evocative objects goes further: objects carry both ideas and passions. In our relations to things, thought and feeling are inseparable. Whether it's a student's beloved 1964 Ford Falcon (left behind for a station wagon and motherhood), or a cello that inspires a meditation on fatherhood, the intimate objects in this collection are used to reflect on larger themes—the role of objects in design and play, discipline and desire, history and exchange, mourning and memory, transition and passage, meditation and new vision.In the interest of enriching these connections, Turkle pairs each autobiographical essay with a text from philosophy, history, literature, or theory, creating juxtapositions at once playful and profound. So we have Howard Gardner's keyboards and Lev Vygotsky's hobbyhorses; William Mitchell's Melbourne train and Roland Barthes' pleasures of text; Joseph Cevetello's glucometer and Donna Haraway's cyborgs. Each essay is framed by images that are themselves evocative. Essays by Turkle begin and end the collection, inviting us to look more closely at the everyday objects of our lives, the familiar objects that drive our routines, hold our affections, and open out our world in unexpected ways.

The Evocative Object World

Author:
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134026579
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 94

Book Description

The Infinite Question

Author: Christopher Bollas
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134026633
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 163

Book Description
In his latest book Christopher Bollas uses detailed studies of real clinical practice to illuminate a theory of psychoanalysis which privileges the human impulse to question. From earliest childhood to the end of our lives, we are driven by this impulse in its varying forms, and The Infinite Question illustrates how Freud's free associative method provides both patient and analyst with answers and, in turn, with an ongoing interplay of further questions. At the book's core are transcripts of real analytical sessions, accompanied by parallel commentaries which highlight key aspects of the free associative method in practice. These transcripts are contextualised by further discussion of the cases themselves, as well as a wider theoretical framework which places its emphasis on Freud's theory of the logic of sequence: by learning to listen to this free associative logic, Bollas argues, we can discover a richer and more complex unconscious voice than if we rely solely on Freud's theory of repressed ideas. Bollas demonstrates, in an eloquent and persuasive manner, how the Freudian position of evenly suspended attentiveness enables the analyst's unconscious to catch the drift of the patient's own unconscious. He also shows that to stimulate further questioning is often of more benefit to the analytical process than to jump to an interpretation. Yet whatever fascinating course a session may take, neither the patient nor the analyst can halt the progress of the self-propelling interrogative drive. The Infinite Question will be invaluable to both the new student and the experienced psychoanalyst, read either on its own or as a practice-based extension of the theoretical ideas elaborated in its companion volume, The Evocative Object World (also published by Routledge).

Being a Character

Author: Christopher Bollas
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134967969
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 308

Book Description
Each person invests many of the objects in his life with his or her own unconscious meaning, each person subsequently voyages through an environment that constantly evokes the self's psychic history. Taking Freud's model of dreamwork as a model for all unconscious thinking, Christopher Bollas argues that we dreamwork ourselves into becoming who we are, and illustrates how the analyst and the patient use such unconscious processes to develop new psychic structures that the patient can use to alter his or her self experience. Building on this foundation, he goes on to describe some very special forms of self experience, including the tragic madness of women cutting themselves, the experience of a cruising homosexual in bars and bathes and the demented ferocity of the facist state of mind. An original interpreter of classical theory and clinical issues, in Being a Character Christopher Bollas takes the reader into the very texture of the psychoanalytic process.

China on the Mind

Author: Christopher Bollas
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0415669766
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 170

Book Description
Thousands of years ago Indo-European culture diverged into Western and Eastern ways of thinking. Bollas examines how they are converging again in psychoanalysis.

Psychoanalytic Politics

Author: Sherry Turkle
Publisher: Guilford Publication
ISBN: 9780898624748
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 344

Book Description
Freud prophesied in 1914 that the ``final decisive battle' for psychoanalysis would take place ``where the greatest resistance [had] been displayed.' Wary of America's too easy acceptance, he suspected a dilution and distortion of his most vital and therefore most unacceptable doctrines. Among Western countries, France may well be the one that resisted Freud the longest. Yet quite suddenly, in the late 1960s, France was seized by an ``infatuation with Freudianism.' By the end of that decade, France had more than a psychoanalytic movement: it had a widespread and deeply rooted psychoanalytic culture. At the heart of this development was Jacques Lacan's reconstruction of Freudian theory, a ``reinvention' of psychoanalysis that resonated with French culture in the aftermath of the uprisings of 1968. While, in America, psychoanalysis has become increasingly identified with an essentially conservative medical establishment, the French rediscovery of Freud, in a dramatic enactment of Freud's prophesy, became associated with the most radical elements of French philosophical and political life. The story of Lacan, and why his work so profoundly influenced the French psyche, is told clearly and unerringly by Sherry Turkle in this groundbreaking work. Already acclaimed as ``an absolutely indispensable contribution to the history of psychoanalysis,' this second edition of PSYCHOANALYTIC POLITICS contains two illuminating new additions. The preface explicates Lacan's impact on the French by laying out a theory of the conditions for the dissemination and acceptance of a set of philosophical positions by a culture. The final chapter, Dynasty 1991, provides a fascinating portrayal of the last years of Lacan's life, the intrigue and power struggles that resulted in the break-up of the Freudian School he founded, and the events which unfolded in the years following his death in 1981. The heart of the book is Sherry Turkle's first-hand account of the psychoanalytic culture that developed in France--as a politicized, Gallicized, and poeticized Freudianism, deeply marked by the work of Jacques Lacan. The clearest introduction in English to Lacan's teaching, the work explores how cultures appropriate theories of mind. It is an intimate sociology of how ideas come to connect with individuals. Providing an ``inner history' of the sciences of the mind, this book will be invaluable reading for anyone with an interest in psychoanalysis, history, social theory, communications, film theory, and contemporary literary criticism.

The Shadow of the Object

Author: Christopher Bollas
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1315437597
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 350

Book Description
In The Shadow of the Object, Christopher Bollas integrates aspects of Freud’s theory of unconscious thinking with elements from the British Object Relations School. In doing so, he offers radical new visions of the scope of psychoanalysis and expands our understanding of the creativity of the unconscious mind and the aesthetics of human character. During our formative years, we are continually "impressed" by the object world. Most of this experience will never be consciously thought, and but it resides within us as assumed knowledge. Bollas has termed this "the unthought known", a phrase that has ramified through many realms of human exploration, including the worlds of letters, psychology and the arts. Aspects of the unthought known --the primary repressed unconscious --will emerge during a psychoanalysis, as a mood, the aesthetic of a dream, or in our relation to the self as other. Within the unique analytic relationship, it becomes possible, at least in part, to think the unthought -- an experience that has enormous transformative potential. Published here with a new preface by Christopher Bollas, The Shadow of the Object remains a classic of the psychoanalytic literature, written by a truly original thinker.

I Have Heard the Mermaids Singing

Author: Christopher Bollas
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Black humor
Languages : en
Pages : 184

Book Description
This dark comic novella follows the life of "the psychoanalyst" in an urban village engaging a cast of characters with whom he shares his life and his ideas. A vulnerable yet thoughtful person shadowed by what he refers to as life after the Catastrophe, he finds himself celebrating "depression", discovering how it is an essential emotion housing insight into the self, society, and world affairs. Amusing, disturbing and thought provoking, the novella reveals in remarkable depth the many faces of depression. The psychoanalyst agonizes over the increasingly fascist dimensions of his profession and provides an excoriating critique of the psychotropic movement. He challenges the world of modern psychology that by stereotyping souls as sufferers of one or another of the newly coined diagnoses, such as Attention Deficit Disorder, ordains a world that reduces humanity. Where thoughtfulness once was, now one discovers a pill, a fashionable new illness, and a twelve-step program that define a life. The arrival of a terrorist in his consulting room seeking treatment in order to carry out a suicide bombing serves as a pivot for other crises that involve the analyst in an increasingly anarchic and surreal era, one that suggests a new world order. Readers will find in this work new perspectives that challenge many assumptions, ironically suggesting that in these difficult times understanding our complex mental lives - as in depression - holds invaluable keys to a better future for the individual and for modern society.

Shakespeare's Restless World

Author: Neil MacGregor
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101638117
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 407

Book Description
The New York Times bestselling author of A History of the World in 100 Objects brings the world of Shakespeare and the Tudor era of Elizabeth I into focus We feel we know Shakespeare’s characters. Think of Hamlet, trapped in indecision, or Macbeth’s merciless and ultimately self-destructive ambition, or the Machiavellian rise and short reign of Richard III. They are so vital, so alive and real that we can see aspects of ourselves in them. But their world was at once familiar and nothing like our own. In this brilliant work of historical reconstruction Neil MacGregor and his team at the British Museum, working together in a landmark collaboration with the Royal Shakespeare Company and the BBC, bring us twenty objects that capture the essence of Shakespeare’s universe. A perfect complement to A History of the World in 100 Objects, MacGregor’s landmark New York Times bestseller, Shakespeare’s Restless World highlights a turning point in human history. This magnificent book, illustrated throughout with more than one hundred vibrant color photographs, invites you to travel back in history and to touch, smell, and feel what life was like at that pivotal moment, when humankind leaped into the modern age. This was an exhilarating time when discoveries in science and technology altered the parameters of the known world. Sir Francis Drake’s circumnavigation map allows us to imagine the age of exploration from the point of view of one of its most ambitious navigators. A bishop’s cup captures the most sacred and divisive act in Christendom. With A History of the World in 100 Objects, MacGregor pioneered a new way of telling history through artifacts. Now he trains his eye closer to home, on a subject that has mesmerized him since childhood, and lets us see Shakespeare and his world in a whole new light.