Back to Table of Contents
1987, p. 51), “the core of the self” (p. 208) and – linking true self to Freud’s concept of primary repression – as “that inherited disposition that constitutes the core of personality, which has been genetically transmitted, and exists as a potential in psychic space,” and he places the true self at “the very core of the concept of the unthought known” (p. 278). In “Forces of Destiny” Bollas (1989) formulates a crucial difference between “fate” and “destiny”. He links fate to the concept of the false self and reactive living and destiny to the fulfilling of one’s own inner potential. In “The destiny drive”, chapter 4, he articulates his belief that the 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 infants experience of the mother’s facilitation of true self movement. As we go through life, our idiom continues to be articulated through our choice and use of objects. In ”Being a Character: Psychoanalysis and Self Experience” (1992) Bollas elaborates his image of idiom as an “intelligence of form” and his ideas of idiomatic object- usage, which he began in ”Forces of Destiny”. “The idiom,” he writes, “that gives form to any human character is not a latent content of meaning but an aesthetic in personality” (pp. 64-65). Our idiom is “our mystery” (1992, p 51). It cannot be known or reached through introspection. We will never encounter the true self as such, we will never know what it is, neither our own or the other’s, but we can sense its derivatives intuitively, in a similar way that we can only sense the Unconscious through it derivatives. Bollas views one’s idiom as being articulated through one’s choice and use of objects, both in the transitional sense (where inner and outer reality meet and where the question of what comes from inside and from outside is kept suspended) and in the “objective” sense, where one encounters the object’s quality of being fundamentally itself, outside the sphere of projective mechanisms, what Bollas calls the integrity of the object. Bollas writes: “If idiom is, then, the it with which we are born, and if its pleasure is to elaborate itself through the choice of objects, one that is an intelligence of form rather than an expression of inner content, its work collides with the structure of the objects that transform it, through which it gains its precise inner contents. This collisional dialectic between the human’s form and the object’s structure is, in the best of times, a joy of living, as one is nourished by the encounter” (Bollas 1992, pp. 59-60). In several instances Bollas discusses the deep “sense of self”. In the chapter “What is this thing called self?” in “Cracking up – the Work of Unconscious Experience” (Bollas 1995) he calls it “a separate sense. A sense that is only a potential in each person, who is born with this sense capacity, and who will, to a greater or lesser extent, develop it.” (ibid, p 154). This sense of self can be blocked and thwarted when, in the individual’s life, there has been too little of sensitive responses to his idiomatic expressions, leaving him with a feeling of emptiness and lack of contact inwards. In the sense of self, Bollas writes, “There is a feeling there of one’s being, of something there, but not a something we can either touch or know; only sense, and it is the most important sensed phenomenon in our life.” (ibid, p 172).
775
Made with FlippingBook - professional solution for displaying marketing and sales documents online