Christopher bollas podcast
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New Book by Christopher Bollas
Meaning and Melancholia: Life in the Age of Bewilderment sees Christopher Bollas apply his creative and innovative psychoanalytic thinking to various contemporary social, cultural and political themes.
This book offers an incisive exploration of powerful trends within, and between, nations in the West over the past two hundred years. The author traces shifts in psychological forces and ‘frames of mind’, that have resulted in a crucial ‘intellectual climate change’. He contends that recent decades have seen rapid and significant transformations in how we define our ‘selves’, as a new emphasis on instant connectedness has come to replace reflectiveness and introspection.
Bollas argues that this trend has culminated in the current rise of psychophobia; a fear of the mind and a rejection of depth psychologies that has paved the way for what he sees as hate based solutions to world problems, such as the victory of Trump in America and Brexit in the United Kingdom. He maintains that, if we are to counter the threat to democracy posed by these change
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Christopher Bollas grew up in California. After a degree in History at the University of California, he worked at a day centre for autistic and schizophrenic children.
There he encountered the work of Anna Freud, Bettelheim and Mahler but was also drawn to the writings of Klein, Winnicott and Tustin to help him imagine these deeply disturbed internal worlds.
While studying for a PhD in English Literature at the University of Buffalo he completed a clinical training in Ego Psychology, then in 1973 he moved to London, where he trained in psychoanalysis at the Tavistock Clinic and with the British Psychoanalytical Society. Influential supervisors and teachers included Paula Heimann, Marion Milner, John Bowlby, David Malan and Francis Tustin, and he also became interested in French psychoanalysis, working with J-B Pontalis and Andre Green.
In the mid 1980s he returned temporarily to the USA as Director of Education at the Austen Riggs Center, Professor of Literature at the University of Massachusetts, and Professor at the Cambridge Hospital at Harvard. He then lived in Londo
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Christopher Bollas
British psychoanalyst and writer
Christopher Bollas | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1943 (age 81–82) Washington D.C., United States |
| Citizenship | United States (birth), United Kingdom (2010) |
| Known for | Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known, Idiom Needs |
| Children | 1, Sacha Bollas |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Clinical Psychoanalysis |
Christopher Bollas (born 1943)[1] is a British psychoanalyst and writer. He is a leading figure in contemporary psychoanalytic theory.[2]
Biography
Early life and education
Bollas was born in the United States in Washington, DC. He grew up in Laguna Beach, California, and later graduated in history from UC Berkeley in 1967. As an undergraduate Bollas studied intellectual history with Carl Schorske, and psychoanalytical anthropology with Alan Dundes. From 1967 to 1969 he trained in child counselling at the East Bay Activity Center in Oakland, California and from 1969 to 1973 he was the first graduate of the Program in Adult Psychotherapy at the University of Buffalo. At the
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