Christopher Bollas
Christopher Bollas on the Enigma of Schizophrenia
Christopher Bollas is a member of the British Psychoanalytical Society, the Los Angeles Institute and Society for Psychoanalytic Studies, and Honorary Member of the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research. He is a member of ESGUT, the European Study Group of Unconscious Thought.
Fascinating interview with Christopher Bollas on schizophrenia in which he talks about over-medicating in the United States, the aetiology of schizophrenia, and why it’s so common in urban metropolitan areas:
“mental life is itself precarious”
“people who have schizophrenic experiences are vulnerable to those changes [of latency, childhood, adolescence] and it’s very important to get them back into time and space. When you have a psychotic moment … you start to feel like you don’t exist anymore. Like you’re not in your body anymore.”
“We’re overmedicating in the United States and we have been for a long time. Not just in the field of mental health, but in ordinary medicine itself. Because it’s ‘cost-effective’. It’s meant to be the cheap way.”
“Are we medicating them to make us feel better?”
On the importance of people talking to other people: “The isolation’s terrible. Be patient: talk to them, keep talking to them, because you want them to get back into the understanding of themselves.”
“The rate of schizophrenia is two and a half times higher in urban metropolitan areas than it is in rural areas. So, it ain’t genetic.”
Christopher Bollas is the author of The Freudian Moment, The Infinite Question, Hysteria, Catch Them Before They Fall, and Forces of Destiny: Psychoanalysis and the Human Idiom. His latest book, When the Sun Bursts: The Enigma of Schizophrenia, has just been published.
Who Christopher Bollas Is
Christopher Bollas is an American-born psychoanalyst who has spent most of his working life in Britain. Before training as an analyst he completed a doctorate in literature, and that double formation shows in his writing: he is one of the few clinical theorists whose books are read as widely outside the consulting room as inside it. His most influential work, The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known (1987), introduced two ideas that have entered the everyday vocabulary of psychotherapy — the “unthought known” (what we know in our bones but have never been able to think) and the “transformational object” (the early experience of being changed by another’s care, which we go on seeking all our lives).
Listening Notes for This Interview
The interview condenses the argument of When the Sun Bursts (2015): that schizophrenic experience is meaningful rather than merely biological noise, that the decisive window is early — before a first psychotic episode consolidates — and that talking with the person, patiently and often, is not a soft adjunct to treatment but the treatment’s core. His claim about urban incidence (rates around two and a half times higher in metropolitan areas than rural ones) is his sharpest challenge to purely genetic accounts. Listeners who want the clinical companion piece should look at Catch Them Before They Fall, his book on working with people on the edge of breakdown.
Bollas’s position here is a minority one in mainstream psychiatry, and he says so plainly; the interview is valuable precisely because it puts the case for psychological understanding of psychosis in its strongest form. For the state of the broader evidence on talking therapies, our guides section covers what different modalities can and cannot claim.
Further reading
- British Psychoanalytical Society — Wikipedia
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