Cracking Up

In this important new book, the distinguished psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas extends his exploration of the inner world of human experience. In Being a Character, he argued that Freud's vision of the dream process is a model for all unconscious mental experience. In Cracking Up, he suggests that the rhythm of that experience-from moments of psychic intensity which we have every day and which we respond to first by cracking up the various factors that went to into them (remembered, bodily, instinctual), and then by recombining them in a new understanding of ourselves-that this unconscious rhythm, fully engaged in, is vital to individual creativity. It develops what Bollas calls a separate sense, with which we assess the immeasurable meanings of our own experience and which are sympathetically attuned to the lives of other people. Bollas examines how people educate one another in the idioms of their unconscious lives, and he considers the nature and consequences of the traumas that inhibit the freedom to do this. He studies what we mean by the past-is it ominously unchangeable, or can history be a creative, open understanding of experience? We come to know who we are by giving form and meaning to our past, yet what do we mean by the self? Bollas's answer suggests yet more ways in which the separate sense expresses each person's unique qualities.