IPA Inter-Regional Encyclopedic Dictionary of Psychoanalysis

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VI. FURTHER AND CONTEMPORARY DEVELOPMENTS OF THE CONCEPT OF THE SELF SPECIFIC TO EUROPE

VI. A. Contemporary British Object Relations Contribution Christopher Bollas has written extensively on the concept of self, its origin, its articulation, the sense of self. He is influenced by Winnicott’s concept the “true self” and has elaborated in a unique way. In his writing in this area he often refers to literature, poetry and arts. In Forces of Destiny (1989) Bollas writes: When Winnicott introduced the term ‘true self’ to stand for an inherited potential that found its expression in spontaneous action, I think he conceptualized a feature of the analytical relationship (and of life) that had heretofore been untheorized … Winnicott’s theory of the true self is, in my view, just such a concept through which we may describe something we know about analysis, but have until now been unable to think (p. 8). Through his writings Bollas elaborates and refines his own thoughts on the true self, for which he gradually substitutes the term “idiom”. He does this partly because he feels that “overusage of a term … [leads to loss of] meaningfulness through incantatory solicitation, devaluing any word’s unthought potential” (1992, p 64), but also because he wishes to find his own way in this elusive area. In the chapter ‘The psychoanalyst’s multiple function’ ( Forces of Destiny 1989), he writes: “The true self cannot be fully described. It is less like the articulation of meaning through words which allow one to isolate a unit of meaning as in the location of a signifier, and more akin to the movement of symphonic music… Each individual is unique, and the true self is an idiom of organization that seeks its personal world through the use of an object… the fashioning of life is something like an aesthetic: a form revealed through one’s way of being.” (1989, pp.109-10) In “The transformational object” in “The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known” (1987) Bollas explores the beginnings of the infant’s elaboration of this individual aesthetic, something that is fundamentally dependent on a facilitating early environment. If the mother does not respond sensitively to the infant’s spontaneous gesture, his/her early idiomatic expressions will be blocked and replaced by false adaptations. But if she is attuned with the infant’s emerging self she will have the capacity, through subtle conscious and unconscious interactions with her baby, to respond to the infant’s true self communication. In ”The Shadow of the Object” he stays close to Winnicott’s formulation describing the true self as “the historical kernel of the infant’s instinctual and ego dispositions” (Bollas,

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