Forces of Destiny, Christopher Bollas (2019)
Introduction
Bollas shares two experiences that changed his view of psychoanalysis. The first was his analysis of a man named Jerome who used the therapeutic space in a way Bollas had never before experienced. “He got me thinking about how an analysis can provide the patient with transference objects that seem to facilitate the analysand’s spontaneous expression of unthought known elements of his own character.” The second experience was the birth of his son. “What struck me was how he was who he was from scratch. He seemed to be in possession of his own personality, his own very unique configuration of being (what I term an idiom) that has never really changed in itself.”
One day when working with Jerome, he realized that “that one of my functions for him was to be of use for his idiom moves — for private articulations of his personality potential — which could only be accomplished by eliciting elements of my own personality.” Bollas noticed that there was a link between the way Jerome used him and his own son’s use of his others to serve as human mediators of the articulation of the true self. It is a form of play in which the subject selects and uses objects in order to materialize elements latent to his personality.”
A theory for the true self
Analysis is not just about making the unconscious conscious but about allowing the patient to use us as an object. The Independent Group of British Psychoanalysts believed that successful analysis involves not only making the unconscious conscious but also creating “fundamentally new psychic experiences generated by the analytic situation.” This book is about “that psychic movement that takes place when the analysand is free to use the psychoanalyst as an object through whom to articulate and elaborate his personality idiom.”
The true self is the potential that requires maternal nurturance to develop. Winnicott saw the spontaneous gesture as “evidence of true self” but did little advance the idea of true self. The true self — “the idiom of the person” — is one’s inborn potential, one’s “inherited set of dispositions.” The true self does not exist fully formed in the unconscious, and as such, it cannot be made conscious the way a repressed thought can be made conscious. The true self, in other words, is a type of “unthought acknowledgement.”When young, our mother’s nurturance can help the true self to evolve. If the mother “knows her infant, if she senses his figural intentions, his gestures expressive of need and desire, she will provide objects (including herself) to serve as experiential elaborators of his personality potential.”
Our job is similarly to nurture the development of the patient’s true self. Our job as analysts is akin to that of the mother. Which raises the question of how we can identify the presence of the patient’s true self. This can be problematic, since the true self is only a potential, something that “comes into being only through experience.” Yet “the analyst can sense when the patient is using him to elaborate an idiom move.”
We must alternately use interpretation and facilitation. Sometimes a patient uses us to develop his true self, and other times a patient uses us in a different way, relating to us as he relates to old objects. We can know how we’re being used by listening to our countertransference. When the patient is acting out in the transference, we use interpretation. When the patient is developing his true self, we use facilitation.
The destiny drive
Psychoanalysis involves both deconstruction and elaboration. Regarding destruction: “The patient brings a dream, a scrap of narrative, a random thought, and the analyst, by asking for associations, breaks down the manifest text of the material to reveal the unconscious latent content. In some respects this is an act of destruction, and most analysts are well accustomed to the patient’s initial distress over having his manifest context (his word) deconstructed in this manner.”
Regarding elaboration: The patient’s unconscious uses the analyst in an act of elaboration, as he “cumulatively constructs his object world through the person of the analyst.” Winnicott wrote that we should allow the transference to develop and not disrupt it by making interpretations, thus allowing the patient “time to establish and articulate his internal world.” By allowing this to happen, we are allowing for the creation of potential space. “Through the illusions of transference, the patient could bring into life elements of the mother, the father, siblings, and parts of his child self. Bringing to life is an important feature of the nature of the transference. There is a difference between talking about the mother, the father, and former child selves, and being the mother or father or a child self.”
To develop the true self, we must develop the ability to use objects. Object Usage. In “The Use of an Object,” Winnicott wrote that the infant must first relate to an object before he can use the object. When the infant relates to the object, he is in the depressive position, and he fears that his hate could harm the internal object. When the actual object survives his hate, he realizes that he can “assume his love of the object in order to use it (in phantasy and reality) without concern about its well-being.” Winnicott believed that the true self can only emerge when we use objects, that is, when we are able to “use objects in a way that assumes such objects survive hate and do not require undue reparative work.”
He uses sex to elucidate the difference between object-relating and object-usage, he talks about sex. Foreplay is an act of object-relating, as the lovers attend to one another’s desires. As things progress, the lovers surrender to ruthlessness, each destroying the relationship “in order to plunge into reciprocal orgasmic use.” If the lovers have not experienced “a good destruction of the object,” they may “masturbate each other, with one partner relating to the other’s sexual needs and mothering them through it.” Similarly, some patients are so afraid of their own destructive phantasies or so afraid of the “being torn to pieces by the analyst, that they cannot bring themselves to use the analyst as an object.” Such a patient might engage in self-analysis, “rigorously analyzing himself in the presence of the analyst who he seeks, if anything, as a supervisor,” or he might not share his “more disturbing feelings.”
A person’s destiny is his true self potential. Destiny refers to the sense that “the person is fulfilling some of the terms of his inner idiom through familial, social, cultural, and intellectual objects. I believe that this sense of destiny is the natural course of the true self through the many types of object relations and that the destiny drive emerges, if it does, out of the infant’s experience of the mother’s facilitation of true self movement.”
How do we determine a patient’s destiny, where they want to be headed? We can look at their dreams, which are expressions of our wishes. A dream “is where some futures are hatched. It is the origin of the vision, the place where the subject plays with the objects, moving them through potential patterns, setting up fields of imagined persons, places, selves and events — to be there as potential actuals for future use.”
We can also look at how a patient is spending his time. “In the last week, I have read certain books. Why have I read what I have? Why have I rejected certain possibilities? When I listen to a record why do I select certain pieces of music and reject others?” And so on. “Do not these choices provide textures of self experience that release me to articulate some idiom move on my part?”
Off the wall
Subject relations theory is essential, “as it allows the psychoanalyst to talk about his own emotional reality, mental processes, and self states as they exist in his work with patients.” Freud showed the importance of doing this when he chronicled his self-analysis in The Interpretation of Dreams. However, since Freud, analysts have made “little effort to evolve and use that voice that Freud established in his writings — a voice that speaks of the person’s experience as both subject and object.” (There are a few expectations, including Winnicott’s writings, Bion’s A Memoir of the Future, Marion Milner’s The Hands of the Living God, Theodore Reik’s The Search Within, and Harold Searles’ Collected Papers on Schizophrenia and Related Subjects.)
When discussing our analytic work with colleagues, it’s important that we discuss, not just the patient, but also ourselves and what happened inside us as we went about our work. “In the course of any session that is reported, what wayward thoughts, fantasies, or images have crossed the analyst’s mind? How does his imaginative conception of the patient change?” And so on.
The dialectics of difference
It is important to establish with our patients that we are different. We can do this by taking the following steps: (1) establishing our own subjectivity, thinking about what we have said, considering our own associations in the same way we consider our patient’s associations, something we can do without ever talking about ourselves with the patient; (2) point out when the patient agrees with us (e.g., if the patient is hesitant after an interpretation, saying, “But something about what I have said is not quite right”); (3) at times saying when we disagree with the patient (e.g., “I find I have a different way of looking at what you have said, from your understanding of it”). Just because we establish our difference does not mean that we cannot also be used by the patient as an object.
We can sometimes share our own associations with the patient. Our associations are not declarations of truth but musings that we want the patient to respond to, elaborate upon. “The patient is free to discard associations that he thinks are on the wrong track, to select those to which he agrees.” Associating to a patient’s dream can encourage the patient himself to associate more.
Patients already correctly perceive parts of our personality. Therefore, by establishing ourselves as a subject in the analysis, we are simply giving “a more honest and analytically fruitful place to the subjective origins of personality, unconscious organization, and analytic practice.”
Bollas shares two experiences that changed his view of psychoanalysis. The first was his analysis of a man named Jerome who used the therapeutic space in a way Bollas had never before experienced. “He got me thinking about how an analysis can provide the patient with transference objects that seem to facilitate the analysand’s spontaneous expression of unthought known elements of his own character.” The second experience was the birth of his son. “What struck me was how he was who he was from scratch. He seemed to be in possession of his own personality, his own very unique configuration of being (what I term an idiom) that has never really changed in itself.”
One day when working with Jerome, he realized that “that one of my functions for him was to be of use for his idiom moves — for private articulations of his personality potential — which could only be accomplished by eliciting elements of my own personality.” Bollas noticed that there was a link between the way Jerome used him and his own son’s use of his others to serve as human mediators of the articulation of the true self. It is a form of play in which the subject selects and uses objects in order to materialize elements latent to his personality.”
A theory for the true self
Analysis is not just about making the unconscious conscious but about allowing the patient to use us as an object. The Independent Group of British Psychoanalysts believed that successful analysis involves not only making the unconscious conscious but also creating “fundamentally new psychic experiences generated by the analytic situation.” This book is about “that psychic movement that takes place when the analysand is free to use the psychoanalyst as an object through whom to articulate and elaborate his personality idiom.”
The true self is the potential that requires maternal nurturance to develop. Winnicott saw the spontaneous gesture as “evidence of true self” but did little advance the idea of true self. The true self — “the idiom of the person” — is one’s inborn potential, one’s “inherited set of dispositions.” The true self does not exist fully formed in the unconscious, and as such, it cannot be made conscious the way a repressed thought can be made conscious. The true self, in other words, is a type of “unthought acknowledgement.”When young, our mother’s nurturance can help the true self to evolve. If the mother “knows her infant, if she senses his figural intentions, his gestures expressive of need and desire, she will provide objects (including herself) to serve as experiential elaborators of his personality potential.”
Our job is similarly to nurture the development of the patient’s true self. Our job as analysts is akin to that of the mother. Which raises the question of how we can identify the presence of the patient’s true self. This can be problematic, since the true self is only a potential, something that “comes into being only through experience.” Yet “the analyst can sense when the patient is using him to elaborate an idiom move.”
For instance, a patient might begin a session “in a lighthearted mood, initiating a relation to me to me based on a sense of joy.” This patient might need my sense of humor, “which I may provide (in Winnicott’s sense of ‘facilitate’) by chuckling when the patient tells a joke or makes a wry comment on life. If the analysand’s comment is amusing, then the analyst’s reception to amusement is essential to the patient’s use of the analyst at that moment.” Another patient might become “highly articulate, evoking the analyst’s capacity to interpret unconscious communications. The analyst, then, is used for his ability to concentrate and bring his analytic intellect to bear on the task. This could constitute a movement of true self as it uses the object.”
In chapter 3, he provides another example. He got tired of interpreting Jill’s negative transference, and one day told her she was being a monster. This impelled Jill to argue with him, something she did over the next several sessions. “By quarreling with me she engaged in reciprocal aggression with an object, an experience previously unknown to her.”
We must alternately use interpretation and facilitation. Sometimes a patient uses us to develop his true self, and other times a patient uses us in a different way, relating to us as he relates to old objects. We can know how we’re being used by listening to our countertransference. When the patient is acting out in the transference, we use interpretation. When the patient is developing his true self, we use facilitation.
The destiny drive
Psychoanalysis involves both deconstruction and elaboration. Regarding destruction: “The patient brings a dream, a scrap of narrative, a random thought, and the analyst, by asking for associations, breaks down the manifest text of the material to reveal the unconscious latent content. In some respects this is an act of destruction, and most analysts are well accustomed to the patient’s initial distress over having his manifest context (his word) deconstructed in this manner.”
Regarding elaboration: The patient’s unconscious uses the analyst in an act of elaboration, as he “cumulatively constructs his object world through the person of the analyst.” Winnicott wrote that we should allow the transference to develop and not disrupt it by making interpretations, thus allowing the patient “time to establish and articulate his internal world.” By allowing this to happen, we are allowing for the creation of potential space. “Through the illusions of transference, the patient could bring into life elements of the mother, the father, siblings, and parts of his child self. Bringing to life is an important feature of the nature of the transference. There is a difference between talking about the mother, the father, and former child selves, and being the mother or father or a child self.”
To develop the true self, we must develop the ability to use objects. Object Usage. In “The Use of an Object,” Winnicott wrote that the infant must first relate to an object before he can use the object. When the infant relates to the object, he is in the depressive position, and he fears that his hate could harm the internal object. When the actual object survives his hate, he realizes that he can “assume his love of the object in order to use it (in phantasy and reality) without concern about its well-being.” Winnicott believed that the true self can only emerge when we use objects, that is, when we are able to “use objects in a way that assumes such objects survive hate and do not require undue reparative work.”
He uses sex to elucidate the difference between object-relating and object-usage, he talks about sex. Foreplay is an act of object-relating, as the lovers attend to one another’s desires. As things progress, the lovers surrender to ruthlessness, each destroying the relationship “in order to plunge into reciprocal orgasmic use.” If the lovers have not experienced “a good destruction of the object,” they may “masturbate each other, with one partner relating to the other’s sexual needs and mothering them through it.” Similarly, some patients are so afraid of their own destructive phantasies or so afraid of the “being torn to pieces by the analyst, that they cannot bring themselves to use the analyst as an object.” Such a patient might engage in self-analysis, “rigorously analyzing himself in the presence of the analyst who he seeks, if anything, as a supervisor,” or he might not share his “more disturbing feelings.”
A person’s destiny is his true self potential. Destiny refers to the sense that “the person is fulfilling some of the terms of his inner idiom through familial, social, cultural, and intellectual objects. I believe that this sense of destiny is the natural course of the true self through the many types of object relations and that the destiny drive emerges, if it does, out of the infant’s experience of the mother’s facilitation of true self movement.”
How do we determine a patient’s destiny, where they want to be headed? We can look at their dreams, which are expressions of our wishes. A dream “is where some futures are hatched. It is the origin of the vision, the place where the subject plays with the objects, moving them through potential patterns, setting up fields of imagined persons, places, selves and events — to be there as potential actuals for future use.”
We can also look at how a patient is spending his time. “In the last week, I have read certain books. Why have I read what I have? Why have I rejected certain possibilities? When I listen to a record why do I select certain pieces of music and reject others?” And so on. “Do not these choices provide textures of self experience that release me to articulate some idiom move on my part?”
Off the wall
Subject relations theory is essential, “as it allows the psychoanalyst to talk about his own emotional reality, mental processes, and self states as they exist in his work with patients.” Freud showed the importance of doing this when he chronicled his self-analysis in The Interpretation of Dreams. However, since Freud, analysts have made “little effort to evolve and use that voice that Freud established in his writings — a voice that speaks of the person’s experience as both subject and object.” (There are a few expectations, including Winnicott’s writings, Bion’s A Memoir of the Future, Marion Milner’s The Hands of the Living God, Theodore Reik’s The Search Within, and Harold Searles’ Collected Papers on Schizophrenia and Related Subjects.)
When discussing our analytic work with colleagues, it’s important that we discuss, not just the patient, but also ourselves and what happened inside us as we went about our work. “In the course of any session that is reported, what wayward thoughts, fantasies, or images have crossed the analyst’s mind? How does his imaginative conception of the patient change?” And so on.
The dialectics of difference
It is important to establish with our patients that we are different. We can do this by taking the following steps: (1) establishing our own subjectivity, thinking about what we have said, considering our own associations in the same way we consider our patient’s associations, something we can do without ever talking about ourselves with the patient; (2) point out when the patient agrees with us (e.g., if the patient is hesitant after an interpretation, saying, “But something about what I have said is not quite right”); (3) at times saying when we disagree with the patient (e.g., “I find I have a different way of looking at what you have said, from your understanding of it”). Just because we establish our difference does not mean that we cannot also be used by the patient as an object.
We can sometimes share our own associations with the patient. Our associations are not declarations of truth but musings that we want the patient to respond to, elaborate upon. “The patient is free to discard associations that he thinks are on the wrong track, to select those to which he agrees.” Associating to a patient’s dream can encourage the patient himself to associate more.
Patients already correctly perceive parts of our personality. Therefore, by establishing ourselves as a subject in the analysis, we are simply giving “a more honest and analytically fruitful place to the subjective origins of personality, unconscious organization, and analytic practice.”
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