In well over 100 published papers, Christopher Bollas has made an extraordinarily wide contribution to psychoanalysis. His work brings together theory and technique, normality and pathology, as it explores the intricate complexity of human subjectivity and the interplay between private, internal, subjective experience and the world of external objects. In addition he has applied his unique psychoanalytical understanding to fields such as literature, architecture, history, social anthropology and politics. He has also produced three novels and a volume of plays.

This seminar will introduce the fundamental concepts that underpin Bollas’s unique approach to the mind. We shall then explore a clinical session in depth, in order to trace the lines of unconscious thinking that are revealed in the patient’s narrative.

Topics will include:

1. The Receptive Unconscious; Repression & receptivity; the receptive unconscious & psychic genera; unconscious perception, unconscious creativity & unconscious communication; the maternal & paternal orders.

2. Human Idiom; Idiom as kernel of self; the unthought known; psychic form & psychic content; self-presentation & self representation, intersubjectivity & interformality

3. The Evocative Object; The aesthetic moment; the transformational object; the aleatory object; object use as a form of thinking

4. Free Association and Unconscious Communication; Networks of the unconscious; psychic focus & psychic dissemination; the logic of sequence; the infinite question

Speaker: Sarah Nettleton

Sarah Nettleton, is a psychoanalyst in private practice in London. Originally a piano accompanist, she has written on various aspects of music and the internal world, including the psychodynamics of musical giftedness. For the past 20 years she has specialised in the work of Christopher Bollas, giving lectures and seminars extensively in the UK and Europe, and in Israel, Turkey, USA, Mexico, India and Ukraine. Her book The Metapsychology of Christopher Bollas: an Introduction was published by Routledge in 2016.

In addition if you would like to support the work of the BB Zeitlyn trust you can make a seperate donanation via the following link:

https://www.justgiving.com/bbzptf

The work of Christopher Bollas