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Mental Axioms and Lived Experience: On Character and the Assumed

Author(s) : Christopher Bollas

Reviews and Endorsements

‘More than a summation of the work of the most remarkable psychoanalytic writer of our time, the subtle clarity and incisive tact of this book about what Bollas calls “collaboration with one’s unconscious”, “our joy in being a self” shows us what it is and what it might be to be in quite new kinds of rapport with ourselves and others. Our assumptions will never be quite the same again.’
Adam Phillips, psychoanalyst and writer

‘In the process of making art, there are many moments. There is the desire of what one wants to see, there may just be a sense of this, it may be discovered along the way. There is allowing accidents to happen, to be intensely focused, to discover what is forming, to stand back. Don’t think it, let it emerge - then think it, then watch. It is a receptivity to what is emerging within and without, a dialogue with the work and with oneself, a "self" that surely is formed in the processes Bollas describes in these pages. The receptive unconscious of infancy, the return of the repressed; it is feeling, it is the assumed, it is the unthought known, it is our own personal idiom, and all that we have experienced. All these states coagulate in the making of the work. Bollas offers us a careful analysis of the inner process to the unmade – unthought from which we emerge and per chance begin the journey back to the sea of maternal beginning.’
Anish Kapoor