Cracking Up: The Work of Unconscious Experience

Bollas, Christopher

ISBN 10: 0415122430 / ISBN 13: 9780415122436

Published by Routledge, 1995

About this Item

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Seller Inventory # wbs4076164558

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Cracking Up: The Work of Unconscious Experience
• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication Date: 1995
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0415122430
• ISBN 13: 9780415122436
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: Good
• Weight: 320 grams

About this title

Synopsis

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.

Synopsis

In this elegantly written and often ironic collection of essays, Christopher Bollas continues his exploration of the inner world of human experience. He shows how we develop a separate sense - intuition - through unconscious processes of free association in which meaning is first condensed and then cracked up', extending our ability to communicate with each other. This process occurs informally in our daily lives and formally in psychoanalysis, where it is brought to consciousness. He argues that an increase in our ability to use these already existing unconscious processes leads to an increase in unconscious freedom; in turn this leads to an increase in our capacity for creativity. Bollas also looks at those people, such as the obesessed or preoccupied, who cannot acheive unconscious freedom in this way, and at those so caught up in a pathological structure that they feel their lives are governed by a logic that seems to derive from factors external to the self. In a disturbing analysis of the serial killer he shows how this failure to develop an intuitive sense can arise and later result in a deeply traumatic conclusion.