Cracking Up

In Being a Character , Christopher Bollas argued that Freud's vision of the dream process is a model for all unconscious mental experience. In Cracking Up he extends his exploration of the inner world of human experience and suggests that the rhythm of that experience is vital to individual creativity. It allows us to develop what the author calls a 'separate sense', which we use to assess the meanings of our own experiences and also to attune ourselves sympathetically to the lives of other people.

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. He studies what we mean by the past - is it unchangeable or can history be a creative, open understanding of experience? We come to know who we are by giving form and meaning to our past - yet what do we mean by the self? Bollas' answer suggests yet more ways in which the 'separate sense' expresses each person's unique qualities.

Every day, according to British psychoanalyst Bollas, each of us experiences hundreds of intense moments when ordinary consciousness mingles with unconscious memories, bodily sensations and instinctual reactions. This process, he maintains, produces ``latent thoughts,'' or unconscious ideas, that give rise to dreams when we sleep. Bollas argues that the freely moving work of the unconscious is vital to our sense of self and to creativity. This erudite neo-Freudian study explores how each individual develops an idiom of the unconscious, a personal way of conveying one's inner experiences. Bollas (Being a Character) also examines how analysts, patients and ordinary people use free association to ``crack up'' or deconstruct dream events, trains of thought, layers of unconscious meaning. He isolates common structures of evil in murder, dictatorships, perverse sadomasochism and genocide, all of which involve ``psychic death'' and compartmentalization, or splitting off, of human qualities. Finally, Bollas provocatively argues that an adult's sense of humor derives from infancy, when the mother stimulates her baby to smile or laugh so as to transform misery into amusement.

Copyright 1995 Cahners Business Information, Inc.