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C Bollas

Publications and source records attributed to C Bollas.

6 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed1984

Moods and the conservative process.

In summary, then, moods are ordinary psychic phenomenon which serve important unconscious functions. Like the dream, a mood has a kind of necessary autistic structure to it: people who are in a mood, like persons who are asleep, are inside a special state where a temporal element is at play. They will emerge, like the dreamer, after the spell is over. Some moods, particularly those that are a part of a person's character, are occasions for the expression of a conservative object, as a conservative object is that internal self state that has been preserved intact during childhood often upon some breakdown between the child in relation to his parents. When a person goes 'into' a mood he becomes that child self who was refused expression in relation to his parents for one reason or another. As such, moods are often the existential registers of the moment of a breakdown between a child and his parents, and partly notate the parent's own developmental arrest, in that the parent was unable to deal appropriately with the child's particular maturational needs. What was a self experience in the child, one that could have been integrated into the child's continuing self development, was rejected by the parents, who failed to perform adequately as ordinary 'transformational objects', thereby destining a self state to be frozen by the child into a conservative object that fated such a state of being to be subsequently represented only through moods.

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PubMed1982

On the relation to the self as an object.

Perhaps the most important object relationship is that relation that each person has to the self as an object of perception, facilitation, and object presenting. In this paper I examine how a person's idiom of being reflects a form of management, and I discuss how in intrasubjective, subvocal space, the self is objectified in the most ordinary sorts of ways. I discuss how each person is an object of handling within the dream space, and I indicate how intersubjective relations always imply a relation to the self as an object. In my view, each individual transfers elements of that maternal care system that handled them as an object when in infancy and childhood by relocating this parental care system into the person's own way of managing themself as an object. As such, in the clinical situation the psychoanalyst can observe how this particular form of transference (to the self as object) manifests itself and furthermore how some of the patient's responses are legitimately viewed as countertransferences: that is, specific reactions to the transferred parental system. I conclude this paper with a brief discussion of how the psychoanalytic situation is uniquely designed to facilitate this self as object relation in so far as the patient must narrate himself to the analyst, and I focus on how the analyst's object, is internalized by the patient and how this alters his own previously arranged self as object relationship.

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PubMed1979

The transformational object.

In work with certain kinds of patients in psychoanalysis who hyperbolize a particular form of object seeking, and in our analysis of certain features of western culture, I think we can isolate the trace in the adult of the earliest experience of the object. The infant's first experience of the object is as a process, rather than a thing in itself, but he perceptually identifies his experience of the object (an experience of psycho-somatic transformation) with the maternal object. For this reason I have termed the first object the transformational object, as I want to identify it with the object as process, thus linking our notion of the object with the infant's subjective knowing of it. Before the mother is personalized to the infant as a whole object she has functioned as a source of transformation, and as the infant's own nascent subjectivity is almost completely the experience of the ego's integrations (cognitive, libidinal, affective) the first object is identified with the alterations of the ego's state. This ego experience remains as an unconscious memory in the adult who relives it through his adamant quest for a transformational object: a new partner, a different form of work, a new material acquisition, an ideology or a belief. The most vivid memory of the earliest object relation occurs in the aesthetic moment when the person feels in deep rapport with the aesthetic object. Such moments are notable for their evocation of the affective memory of the earliest object relation. It is important for psychoanalysts to understand that the psychoanalytic setting and process invites the patient to remember the earliest object relation, so that a patient's expectation that the analyst will perform a transformational function is not necessarily either a wish or a resistance to the analytic work, but may, in fact, be the patient's response to the regressive invitation of the psychoanalytic space.

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