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“... Christopher Bollas is perhaps the most prolific and widely read psychoanalytic author at work today. It’s easy to see why this should be so. His books are written in a conversational style that quickly establishes a friendly, frank relation with his reader, and he exudes the confidence of a master practitioner: he is above all a man of (clinical) experience ...”

“... is repetition itself that is the problem, that signifies trauma. This is one of the paradoxes that Christopher Bollas and Malcom Bowie examine in their differently eloquent and intriguing books. Embarrassed alike by the subtlety and complexity of the work of art and of the patient, can the theorist and the analyst do more than repeat what they already ...”

“... meant to be a source of encouragement that science cannot control its own child. The psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas once speculated on how different – and how much better – psychoanalysis might have been if Freud had remained true to one of his earliest moments: when he found himself up a mountainside listening to the random thoughts of a young ...”

“... far likelier to comply.’ This is almost exactly the scenario laid out by the psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas in his 1995 article ‘The Structure of Evil’ when he describes the ‘psychic death’ or ‘radical infantilisation’ that the serial killer imposes on his victim: ‘With the total collapse of trust and the madness expressed by ...”

“... Adam Phillips writes: Soon after I’d qualified as a child psychotherapist someone – I think Christopher Bollas – suggested that I should write to Frank Kermode about writing a Fontana Modern Master on Winnicott. This seemed to me an extraordinary idea. I had never wanted to be a writer, and this series of what were often rather remarkable books ...”

“... a select few of whom performed their symptoms for the benefit of an interested audience. If, as Christopher Bollas says, ‘the hysteric watches the effect of his or her desire upon the other,’ Charcot watched hysteria itself; using hypnotism to induce a display of symptoms rather than as a therapy, looking for clues rather than cures. Despite the ...”

“... of the human mind summoned up the necessity of freedom. ‘The method of free association,’ Christopher Bollas writes, ‘subverts the psychoanalyst’s natural authoritarian tendencies.’ It is a new method of thinking, he continues, which unleashes the ‘disseminating possibilities that open to infinity’. Infinity as infinity (the universe ...”