In this original and thought-provoking book, Bollas examines how people educate one another in the idioms of their unconscious lives and considers the nature and consequences of the traumas that inhibit the freedom to do this.

Bollas offers an original and illuminating theory of hysteria that weaves its well-known features - repressed sexual ideas; indifference to conversions; over-identification with the other - into the hysteric form.

Bollas integrates the contribution of the British School of Object Relations with the fine texture of problems that have arisen in the author's own clinical practice.

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'. This title rejects the simplistic notion that mental life is unconsciously determined.

Uses detailed studies of real clinical practice to illuminate a theory of psychoanalysis which privileges the human impulse to question. This title includes transcripts of real analytical sessions, accompanied by parallel commentaries which highlight key aspects of the free associative method in practice.

Taking Freud's model of dreamwork as a model for all unconscious thinking, Bollas argues that we dreamwork ourselves into becoming who we are. He illustrates how patient and analyst can use such unconscious processes to alter self experience.

Christopher Bollas is an exponent of the ideas, meanings and experience of psychoanalysis currently writing in English. Here he examines and reflects on one of the fundamental questions: what is it that is unique about us as individuals? How does this manifest itself in our personalities, relationships and in the psychoanalytic process?

This cross-genre novella introduces a comic hero - the psychoanalyst - who muses on ordinary yet essential psychological, philosophical and theological questions following The Catastrophe. Everyday scenes and characters form a background as he considers various issues, most centrally a feeling that good and evil have become inverted and that the western world has lost its meaning. In the first .

Psychoanalysis has become in the West the dominant paradigm for understanding our emotional lives. But do we know what it's all about? Using examples from popular culture and everyday experience, each book in the series explains a psychoanalytical concept and its ability to illuminate the nature of human society and culture.

If you want a fresh wind in you therapeutic sails, read this book.

Christopher Bollas takes the reader right to the heart of psychotherapy, examining the mysterious aspects of the self that are revealed by the free associative process.