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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, 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
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