BEING A CHARACTER Being a Character shows how each person unconsciously invests the ordi nary objects of life with very particular and private meaning. As each person subsequently voyages through the environment he or she encounters objects that are already laden with previously invested meaning and in this sense the individual is evoked by encounters with objects. Taking Freud's theory of the dream work as a model for all uncon scious thinking, Bollas argues that we dream work ourselves into becoming who we are, and he illustrates how the analyst and the patient use unconscious processes to develop new psychic structures that the patient can use to alter his or her self experience. Building on this ground, the latter part of the book describes very special kinds of self experience, including the tragic madness of women cutting themselves, the odd experience of a cruising homosexual in bars and baths, the demented ferocity of the Fascist state of mind, and every person's self experience as a member of his or her historical epoch. He includes a seminal chapter on the Oedipus Complex, arguing that Sophocles and Freud point to an entirely different "resolution" to this complex than heretofore argued in any of the schools of psychoanalytic thought. The main purpose of Being a Character is to rethink the nature of the individual's creation of a lived environment. The author draws on his clinical experience as well as the notebooks and writings of poets, scien tists, painters, sculptors and anthropologists to support his view that each person dreams him- or herself into existence and walks about henceforth in his or her own private dream. Copyrighted Material "In this extraordinary book, Bollas depicts how the unconscious enters into the experience of self and structures the meaning of our inanimate and human environments. For Bollas, the self can be a generative asylum that allows the individual to play with and sample aspects of reality. With great skill and charm Bollas brings a fresh perspective to many central issues in psychoanalysis such as character formation and the creative process. Being a Character demonstrates again that Bollas is among the most original of contemporary psychoanalytic authors." Arnold H. Modell, M.D. "Being a Character is an extraordinarily rich and original book about what human subjectivity feels like, how it makes a world, how the world makes it... Christopher Bollas is one of the most stimulating and useful writers about psychology working in the English language today." Robert Hass "An original interpreter of the Winnicottian legacy, Christopher Bollas brilliantly illuminates the realm of psychic creativity - the individual making of meaning. Few other psychoanalytic writers have been able to range so widely between conscious and unconscious, theory and sub jective experience, reflection and emotion." Jessica Benjamin, Ph.D. "Christopher Bollas is that rarest of psychoanalysts who can blend the cool linear scientific ego seamlessly with the flowing warmth of poetic self to evoke the ineffable complexity of lived experience. In Being a Character he takes us on a journey along the frontiers of self knowledge that becomes at the same time a deeply penetrating excursion into the depths of subjectivity. After immersing myself (my self) into Bollas's multifaceted world and self, I resurfaced enriched and enhanced." ErnestS. Wolf, M.D. Copyrighted Material Christopher Bollas BEING A CHARACTER Psychoanalysis and Self Experience O Routledge ft j^ Taylor & Francis Group LONDON AND NEW YORK Copyrighted Material First published in the United States of America by Hill & Wang, a division ofFarrar, Straus & Giroux 1992 Reprinted in paperback in 1993, 1994, 1997, 2003 and 2006 by Routledge 27 Church Road, Hove, East Sussex BN3 2FA 270 Madison Avenue, New York NY 10016 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © 1992 by Christopher Bollas All rights reserved. Published by arrangement with Hill and Wang, a division ofFarrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. All rights reserved Printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books Ltd, Bodmin, Cornwall This publication has been produced with paper manufactured to strict environmental standards and with pulp derived from sustainable forests. Excerpt from "Cut" from The Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath, edited by Ted Hughes. Copyright © 1963 by Ted Hughes. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 13: 978-0-415-08815-2 ISBN 10:0-415-08815-1 Copyrighted Material For Mark and Blair Copyrighted Material Copyrighted Material Acknowledgments Ken Bruder, Edward Corrigan, Berthe Ficarra, Pearl-Ellen Gordon, and Murray Schwartz kindly read an early draft of Part I of the book, and I am grateful to them for their comments. Two of the chapters in Part I were also given a very close read by members of the Santa Barbara Summer Workshop in Psychoanalysis and I am pleased to thank the members of this group and its organizer, Laurie Ryavec. Linda Mason, who typed the many versions of the book, and who made important editorial suggestions, has been a great help. I am also grateful to Alison Wertheimer for some deft copyediting at exactly the right moment. I would like to thank my publisher, Arthur Rosenthal, for his unqualified enthusiasm for this book from start to finish, and for his shrewd and intelligent suggestions along the way. And Suzanne and Sacha: thank you. Copyrighted Material Copyrighted Material Contents Introduction 3 I 1. Aspects of Self Experiencing 11 2. The Evocative Object 33 3. Being a Character 47 4. Psychic Genera 66 5. The Psychoanalyst's Use of Free Association 101 II 6. Cutting 137 7. Cruising in the Homosexual Arena 144 8. Violent Innocence 165 9. The Fascist State of Mind 193 Copyrighted Material