Brett Kahr interviews Christopher Bollas Part 1

who is kindly agreed to give us an interview and Brett car will be inie we are grateful to them both now in introducing Christopher RZ I find myself in a difficulty for probably like people today I have not met him this afternoon and um what I know of him comes entirely from his writings in these days I cannot equate the text from the author indeed I'm not sure that uh Dr beras would claim to have actually written the books that have his name on the title perhaps the most say is that he was there in his um early non-fiction BS he tells us that he's a psychoanalyst and a member of the independent group of the British psychoanalytical Society but in his last three um works of fiction allegorical Works dark at the end of the tunnel I have heard the mermaid sing and F play I here show you all we are given is a nice picture of Christopher bres and alongside that is written Christopher Bas Ras lives in London and North Dakota now his name still appears of the rytical society although I'm not sure when he last actually attended a meeting and he was recently described to me as the major theoretical contributor to the independent group but what strikes me about Christopher VZ is not that he's a psychoanalyst Al of course he is but his disidentification with the analytic movement I am not as he puts it himself r off those ANS to describe um Christopher VZ as a independent is like describing be as a Clin it's not wrong but it's not right either for he is his own man and nowhere is this more parent than in his recent allegorical writings which represent a new and original literary journal I do however have a link to Christopher Bess which you probably know well in his um noas he describes U Bon as his hero and his um three works of fiction immediately bring to mind that bian also turned away from the case history as a mode of transmitting psychoanalytical knowledge preferring the greater authenticity of fiction in his Memoir of the future now it so happens that I was analyzed by Dr be so I um want to draw attention to uh one or two features that are common to both sets of texts first the subject is distributed over several personalities Bean appears as the psycho analist as PA as um bian as me and as myself who engage in dialogue with other CS but also with each other similarly Buras inhabits a wide range of his characters allowing for a wide range of conflicting opinions second neither of them thought very highly of the institutionalization of psycho analysis I I'd like to CR here from uh J this is second this is a quote growing shiness of the so PR analysis oppressed by the illest of his own psychical Society it's FC structure and that is be this again is a quote the psycho analyist began their dog like y yeling an noise devoid of meaning and an no likely to make thought impossible I do think that Bess with descent from be's observation that psychoanalysis is too important to be interested to S analysts um thirdly I would describe both boness and bian as men of Faith a state of mind described by ban as um a sense of experiencing the proximity of reality of truth it was experienced by the analyst in bess's MA this is one of my favorite episodes where he went to find a God in whose existence he did not believe um whether you call it um um God or psychoanalysis or art or science it doesn't matter but both beon and Boles have spent their lives trying to find it at least trying to draw near to them put it that way and um beress has heard the mermaid singing and I believe he has heard them singing to him um I have the pleasure of actually knowing car and I can personally vouch for his audition scholarship and charm he is TR this I um he is um senior clinical research fellow in Psychotherapy and mental health at the Center for Child mental health in London he's a resident psychotherapist on BBC Radio 2 and he's auor of an award winning biblography and biography of Don WI he always says nice things about everybody um he's also a c artist and an accomplished bus in fact he is a man of many parts IE for very much to introduce well Audrey our thanks to you for that very helpful introduction and ladies and gentlemen good afternoon thank you all for coming out on the Saturday I I think we're in for a really rich privilege this afternoon because we will have an opportunity to hear directly from Dr Christopher Bolas and I would agree entirely with orre cley's assessment that we are here in the presence of one of the major thinkers in psychoanalysis both present and and past I think one of the most significant psychical voices in publication uh so I think it's a very special opportunity to really get to know your work and hear about your influences what's helpful about psychoanalysis what might be harmful about psychoanalysis and how we can all develop our work we have a very generous period of two hours and the plan will be for Dr Bolas and I to have a conversation and you are extremely welcome to watch and listen into this conversation and I think we'll see how we go and how much material we can cover because there are some some very key areas that I feel we must touch upon uh ranging from Dr bolas's very early influences to as as Audrey has said his most recent writings which I think are a departure from articles published in the international Journal of psychoanalysis for example because of late he has published two novelas a third is on its way which we will hear about from free association books as well as an entire volume of plays and I think this represents a very interesting new genre in psychological literature and I'd like us to get to know more about it and I certainly have an enormous number of uh Fascinations with it that I'd like to discuss with you so that's the plan for us to see how much of the the Bolas erra we can get through in this period of time and then we'll open it up for discussion and questions and and I know we won't run out of material if if anything we will leave frustrated so welcome thank you thank you all for joining us and and a special welcome to you for agreeing to this interview I first discovered the name of Christopher Bas I I shall ever forget the occasion it was 1982 and I was a student and I was supposed to be writing an essay on the role of the hypothalamus in behavior and I really didn't want to write this essay and I was in the University library reading room uh doing everything I could not to read up about the hypothalamus but instead I was leafing through back issues of the international Journal of psychoanalysis and I got to 1979 which was on the bottom shelf and then I got a very tall step ladder to go up to the beginning of the next shelf which was 1980 and I stumbled upon your piece the transformational object and although I was at top this very high step ladder because the bookshelves went up even higher than these and I stood there transfixed and I read the entire essay standing up on top of that ladder because I thought my goodness this is a really interesting article it it it felt very very different to anything else that I had read in psychical literature and I became I became very transfixed by your writings and I've been reading them for the last 24 years and rereading them and I I think you know I'm certainly not the only person who has had this experience from Reading Dr Bolas I know that Andre green your friend has has said this about you he says here again is that man who is a psychoanalyst and does not write like a psychoanalyst I.E who miraculously avoids being boring dog Matic pedantic and I thought you know based on my experience of reading you that that was a really good description of of the Bolas Cannon I don't know if you'd agree with Andre green that there's something there's something different about you well I think in my writing certainly with the essays that um I each of the essays really began with a a question in my mind a problem often with a patient sometimes with myself uh and so I set about to write in order to think about it so I didn't know what I was going to say ahead of time and for me writing was really a way of thinking quite a different way of thinking than talking and um I also in those days 1970s had um uh very little time to write I mean like old psychoanalysts and psychotherapists we work so hard we only have so much time I had Sundays and I also had a family and so my agreement with myself was that there could never be a second draft this was it and so I would start out and usually write an essay from beginning to end in one day because if I waited until the following Sunday if I could get Time free to do it I would have lost the connection to the essay and to the questions so I'd start quite early in the morning and get into a sort of I would call it almost a sort of trans meditative State and then hopefully by the end of the day or in the evening it would have it would be there um and I also made a promise to myself that I would always send them off republication because that made it more serious and um the journals would get an essay full of tipex uh blots lots of mistakes lots of typographical errors and I didn't I couldn't line copy Ed of them and so some of the more amused readers would say is English this man's first language um as an American I would have to say it isn't um but uh I um for me it was always a um a matter of trying to to address particular question transformational object was really what is there as an analan what is there for me as a patient about this process that works almost uh regardless of what the psychoanalyst says what is there about this that just seems intrinsically therapeutic and so that's the question I started off with now I I have kept notebooks since 1973 they're they're intellectual notebooks they're not clinical notebooks for sale although there's some clinical vignettes and those are just quite private and I would I'd write anything I wanted to so the transformational object actually was something I worked on from 1973 to 1978 um um and usually it takes well in those days certainly would take between five and seven years for a paper to arrive after the first beginnings of thinking about it and even now I would say it takes an embarrassingly long period of time uh U years and years before an essay is um goes from having been worked on the notebooks to the time I sit down to write it um and was it was they were always quite intense occasions I I didn't have time to do quote unquote reviews of the literature which I also found almost a kind of um literary of a literary speech impediment I mean it it's just so hard as a reader to be confronted in the first instance by this uh obstacle to the topic whatever the topic is um so they tended to be um without real they were not scholarly essays they were not reviews of the literature and they were always fragments they were always incomplete and then I'd walk away and I try to forget about the fact that I'd left out so much and then later on I would think oh my God that wasn't in there never mind maybe it'll show up somewhere else I had a sense that whatever I was writing that that there might be another time much later on in my life when I would go back to the topic or it would come back to me and and then I would um have another thought about it and I would say that was a kind of O license I gave myself which was maybe you'll live long enough to go back to this topic again if not tough luck so there's a a certain kind of would say way in which I I I come back to some topics I haven't written about the unthought known really since the shadow of the object but I'm just now going back to it this next year and that's 20 years practically I mean it's it's fascinating to hear about your process uh how an idea germinates and then begins in these 1973 notebooks and might take 5 to seven years to percolate I mean it seems to me that what you're describing is is the process that a great novelist might describe of how how a character forms in the mind and and how a landscape gets created which I think is very different to a lot of the more technique orientated writing that one hears about in psychotherapists and psychon analysts people who feel they've they've done their research they they know the answers already and they have to go through this arduous almost secretarial task of then writing it up quite quickly for public ation I mean I don't know if there are colleagues nowadays whom you read that you find inspiring or whether you you feel you've sort of left much of the scholarly psychological literature behind and want to pursue your own thoughts and ideas well now I think there one has only so much time to read and uh I I can actually enjoy reading the so-called scientific literature um especially it's if it's kind of an intriguing topic um there certainly are two very different traditions of writing probably more than that but between the scientific and the humanistic Traditions it's just completely different worlds the humanist model is to take a single example and universalize from it so that's in my view Freud is the humanist who takes a single case and then writes about obsessional roses or his area from that one case basically as the scientific model is have to study hundreds if not thousands of cases you then assemble all the data and then you come to whatever conclusions you can I think both of them are are valid ways of going about trying to discover something and think about something um so um I think there there are great writers in psychoanalysis I mean Adam Phillips is a great great writer Michael ion is a great writer um I've just looked at a book called rean it's just published by Continuum by New York candidate actually um it's it's a extraordinary book on RKA and Freud so um I'm actually impressed by how many really good books there are in s analysis Kaja Silverman who's at Berkeley has just written a wonderful book I think there's within the academic world um there's there a lot of really really good books um coming out I'm I'm sorry I don't have time to read really get to them um so I I but I don't I I've turned more away I have turned away somewhat from the psychon alytical world of you know reading in that world I read an awful lot of psychon analyses um in my 20s um and um and some in my 30s and then less after that really I would imagine for the development of One's Own cre ity it's important to have that psychological base inside and then also to feel that you can turn your back on in whatever way yes I think I'd gone through quite a few Metamorphoses I started out at when I was at Berkeley I was doing history and trying to I was my dissertation was on um 16th Century Village Life and also what went wrong with the Puritans in New England and so um I happen to take a course with Frederick Cruz who now of course is a um kind of the bad boy of psychoanalysis but he was a wonderful teacher and a very generous man and Fred Cruz took me into his graduate seminar on English uh literature and critical theory and that's where I began to learn about psychoanalysis in the applied section and it helped me to really to understand why the first generation of PS were going nuts I mean why they were going mana and psychoanalytical writings were extremely helpful in in studying that um I also happen to have an analysis with a psychoanalyst at the University of California which just changed my life completely uh it was incredibly helpful the most helpful analyst I've ever had I think it's always good to have an analysis when you're young I was I 22 uh and um and then as part of one my um I having to serve as I was a war resistor in in the 60s and opposed to the war in Vietnam but not a conscientious objector and as part of my uh as part of the settlement between my my lawyer who was trying to keep me out of falson prison and the US District Attorney's office which was trying to put be in there they um they settled on my um going to work with children uh at a school after I graduated this was a school for autistic and schizophrenic children and uh most of the people there were honor freudians and brunal bleheim people so I studied a lot of Honor Freud's theories bleheim mer um and so that was one period of my life and then after that I moved to the University of Buffalo uh and um to a course um when you're a graduate student you you teach courses uh in whatever you want to especially in the 60s so I offered a course called madness in 20th century fiction and I got 350 students we had to move from one room to this vast room and um uh probably six of the students of the young people were psychotic and of six poor were active schizophrenics they were hallucinating and I I just walked across the the campus to the University Health Center and I said I would like you to train me as a psychotherapist I've got some very disturbed students I think I really want to work with them I didn't want to teach them about schizophrenia uh and I met a wonderful man Boyd Clark who was director of this U uh Center he said never thought of doing this before he said well I'll tell you what um I'll give you a case I'll supervise you and we'll go from there I have to get approval however from the head of the Department of the chetry who knew this man Lloyd Clark to be a bit of a an eccentric and thought this was one of Lloyd's you know uh Wayward moments uh but it worked out the the patient was a good patient I was able to work with him Lloyd Clark was a good supervisor went from there so two days of the week I work full-time with students and we we created a program in Psychotherapy training for individuals in the humanities how extraordin it must have been a first in American it was first and we would have got to the PHD level but Nelson Rockefellers um uh legislature shut him down because Nelson was creating too many PHD programs uh and and it was shut down as a doctoral program but not as a training program so uh Norman Holland Murray Schwarz Robert Rogers and others then did some aspects of these of this training and we had people from the Department of philosophy and anthropology so it was successful for a while and and I don't think it exists anymore um but uh uh the Lloyd Clarks was a deeply immersed in existential thinking so his supervisions and those of his friends were really existential psychoanalysis and so I was immersed in that tradition then a year in Boston was pure ego psychology and I was um supervised by ego psychologist and uh immersed in that then I came to England and I was simultaneously at The Institute of psychoanalysis and at the tabis in those days the tabis adult Department was all Clan and The Institute I basically hung out with the independence but I got very different uh Traditions their way of thinking about people and it always had an interest in Lon a good friend of mine Stuart Schneiderman who was at Buffalo who went to Paris to be in analysis with Lon and Stuart was very patient with me because I would would always say I still can't understand what the hell he's talking about and it took me a good 15 years I think uh to really begin to get L uh and so after all of these um immersions I I I I don't think I have room for anything else now I mean I I think that I've had enough of the of that and and they're in me somewhere and um I mean if something remarkable comes along and really is interesting I I'll I'll go for it but I you know fortunately it doesn't seem to be hanging on the horizon well thank you for that I mean that makes a great deal of sense and you obviously have been really well fed and it's a very very very different formation to I would imagine the vast majority of mental health professionals certainly in Great Britain MH I mean I think it is possible to do a training nowadays at a very venerable institution and get through by reading only a few key clim papers for example I think that is entirely possible but it's very cheering to hear about this very rich and very multistranded education that takes in literature that takes in Leon all of these influences the Boston EOS psychologists and and I think I think it then shows in in your writing can we come back to Buffalo I just have a particular particular interest because the the Buffalo department is it's it's it's such an oasis of psychological Brilliance if there were all these great psychological literary critics that you mentioned like Norman Holland like Marie Schwarz and there was also the the clinical psychoanalyst hin lonstein who's something that I've always found interesting but you you've studied with them and I'm not sure people people know the name of heinstein I think' be nice to to remember him hin lickstein was um actually an analand of of of Chris in New York and I think rather like Michael bant um here in England was sent North so ballant I think was sent to Manchester or somewhere and and and Hines lickstein was sent to Buffalo and that really is like in America knows it's like being sent to the kulok this was really uh really an outpost he was the only zako analist in Buffalo ever just never been another um he was a student like Hans L of Martin Hyer he studied with Hyer although he was a more serious student of H so he' been deeply deeply affected by heyer's thinking and uh uh he he wrote an essay in 1964 identity and sexuality which was published in the Journal of the American um I'd actually um read lonstein when I was in Berkeley I knew about him before I went to Buffalo this was just a uh kind of fortuitous that I met him um and he was a profoundly intelligent man he actually reminded I know that I realized he the one person whom he's like is he was like beon he actually they they had similar qualities he he was a very tall man he was he had his like sunken Look to Him uh he was slow to speak when he spoke it was to some internal point but not necessarily referential to the group that he was speaking to uh and so he was a man of great depth and I highly recommend his book The Dilemma of human identity which some of the people at Buffalo really put together for him uh but he's one of the uh one of the great psychoanalysts in the United States um uh and he did have quite an influence on those of us in Buffalo he was shy so he was a bit hard to to get him out of his Consulting room to come talk um and he was a very gifted analyst I understand from people who were in analysis with him but the department of literature also had lesie feedler uh who was a very gifted critic and he was my dissertation director I did Melville the doctoral dissertation on on Melville um and there were a lot of poets there that were that that added something Robert Hass was there Robert KY Gregory Corso um uh Olsen had just had been there for a long time Black Mountain School was there um uh there were novelists bar barel uh vonet uh was there there uh well I was there Michel Fuko was there for a year uh we had regular groups from French analysts Rosal came for several months the reason they all came is that um Nelson Rockefeller had given the University of Buffalo an extraordinary budget they had so much money that they could invite people from all over the world to all places buff no one would ever have gone to Buffalo unless they were paid a lot of money to uh but there was a terrific Department of the uh there was a terrific chair of department uh Albert Cook uh who is a very generous gracious man who invited people from many different walks of life many different approaches and I think that when I think of well why do some institutions work and why do others not work uh I think that the one thing I would pick out is whether or not an institution has a great leader R leadership is crucial um when Bob Gosley was the chair the director of the tavist it was a terrific institution and indeed it was too when when Jo suin was the the director it was a great great place and institutions are going to be as good as their leaders if they have bad leaders they're not going to be so very good the best you can hope for is a leader who's nice not very effective but at least not dogmatic yes you know and excluding people that's best you but if you have an inspired leader and buffalo did in in Al cook then he brought together a remarkable Department of English and the other departments which had lots of money economics history so on they had nothing like that kind of group so for about 10 years people who had a chance to go to Y Harvard or Berkeley for Graduate Studies went to Buffalo yeah show up there yeah and it was quite quite something well what what an amazing formation to have had do does it rankle you that today the vast majority of clinicians do not have a literary background I think it's you think it's a handicap not coming you know not knowing your mville inside out I don't know about knowing Melville or about specific works of literature I mean the the the medical community in Great Britain is quite literate actually compared to the equivalent in in the United States I think it's a problem if you're going to submit an essay to the international Journal of psychoanalysis because it's really now gone to a social scientist perspective so uh if you're coming from the humanities if you write a a really a clinical essay from the humanistic point of view um they're going to ask for evidence they're going to want to have you know a the research of the literature they want that stuff that makes them feel comfortable um and I think that the that there has been a shift a change they're perfectly it's perfectly fine if that's their bias that's the orientation but if you come from a different world it's a loss so I I do miss that because International I always thought of as a place where one could send one's work you know it was a good container in that question but it's not one now that I would send my St to if you were to send the transformational object essay in today do you suspect might be accepted or it would be rejected uh and most of my I have sent two or three essays or I did all and the last two or three all of them were rejected by the international so and I you know on the same ground more evidence this is this is simply this man's point of view and I think there's a fundamental category ER here Gilbert R's notion know uh uh if you don't understand the category this kind of writing uh then you miss the point you know uh so uh category erors are actually responsible for an awful lot of misunderstandings and psychoanalysis and and other parts of the world this one is two but I I'm also upset most of all by the movement internationally toward um the uh demand that those who can be psychoanalysts have to psychiatrist or psychologists and if I get invited to a country where the only people are training are psychiatrists or psychologists and no one else I make a point of addressing that issue in that country the the fact that entire countries like Italy which did not have this stipulation have now gone that way and uh and other uh countries um Argentina where that's a population the fact there's so little protest about this and that and yet we think of psychoanalysis losing its contact with culture we think of all the evil forces outside of psychoanalysis trying to crush us it's a nonsense I mean we we've cut ourselves off from entire worlds in psychoanalysis we've cut ourselves off from the economists from people in anthropology sociology philosophy uh literature sure uh if you cut yourself off from uh the Vitality of culture you're going to wind up isolated and it's a we bit ironic that we've Allied ourselves with Psychiatry and psychology to professions that I would not say have a love relationship beside when El you you spoke to us about having been a war resistor during the Vietnam war and you you come from this literary background rather than a medical background or Clinical Psychology Social Work background what have you and yet you managed to complete the the very classical training of both the tavist clinic in the adult department and at The Institute of psychoanalysis I mean was that a real tension for you both being somehow you know from a much more Maverick background as well as being very much at at the center of institutional psychoanalysis has has that been an ongoing struggle for you well I I I certainly was surprised when I first came to to London I I uh i' come over by sea because I thought one should Mark a move like this with um the measure of time and one shouldn't fly over to the country given the significance of the move and the first week that I was here I founded up the Institute and I said um that I'd been uh in traveling to the country country and i' I've missed my post my mail I said but I assumed there was a reception for the new students and I wondered where it would be and and I'd hoped i' had not missed it there was this long pause at the other end of the phone and the woman said reception and I said well you know for the incoming students and she and and she said well there wouldn't be that uh so then she said so um what's your name again and I gave her my name and she said um are you registered I thought well I've been accepted I well send me the registration well she said are you in the roster and I said I didn't know what the roster was so I said well I don't know she said well let me look you up she said you're not in the roster which in effect meant I didn't exist so that wish rather shocking and within the same week I tried to recover by going to the library to read up on some literature to study Melville and um I was told by the librarian that I I could not have access to the library without a letter from the president of society now this is the way um they treated accepted candidates in those days imagine how they relate to the outside world

Channel: THERIP

Views: 13,771

Keywords: Christopher Bollas

Id: V6Ie71lN_Pg

Length: 39min 26sec (2366 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 14 2016