‘Meaning and
melancholia: Life in the age of bewilderment.’ Routledge 2018
By Christopher Bollas. Reviewed by Jim Davis.
It was such a delight an inspiration for me to read this book. Here is a leading light in the psychotherapeutic world applying his creative and innovative psychodynamic thinking to a range of social, cultural and political issues.
My fear has been that the early-days ‘portrait’ of Transactional Analysis as a ‘social psychiatry’ has, mostly, come to resemble Oscar Wilde’s ‘Picture of Dorian Gray’, and that Pearl Drego’s call to transactional analysts to get out of our ‘psychic closets’ and involve ourselves in social movements for change remains largely unheard.
At the heart of this book, as the title suggests, is the fundamental importance of the search for meaning, and it is the process of searching that’s crucial as opposed to finding any definitive ‘truth’. As Bollas puts it, ‘Arguably, the quest itself (for meaning) constitutes the meaning to be found’. Indeed one could describe the book itself as an invitation to do just that. RSVP!
His view is that there has been a ‘longstanding turn towards cynicism and passivity in our culture, a loss of belief in ourselves which has grown across generations and is now a psychic fact of our lives.’ Socially this fatalism manifests as a ‘detached, cynical spectatorism, opposed to any active engagement and involvement…an abandonment of a commitment to social justice.’ With the loss of meaning, and the feeling that our lives can make a contribution, mourning has turned to melancholia, and we share the experience of a collective ‘bewilderment.’
Bollas begins his book, in the Preface, by referring to the disturbing victory of Donald Trump in America, the vote for Brexit in the UK, and the rise of right-wing populism in Europe. In doing so he offers us an invitation to widen our perspective from that of the individual, and even the family (itself shaped by politics, economics and culture) to the social, political and cultural realms. He enjoins us both a) to use our psychological theories to understand what is happening in our social world, and b) to account how ‘what is happening in our social world’ in turn shapes our selves.
Social, political, economic and technological factors create frames of mind which are shared collectively, and are transmitted from generation to generation. Throughout the book Bollas’s search for meaning can be seen as dialectical - a ‘dialogue’ that shuttles between two seemingly opposing perspectives – in this case the social (history, politics, culture, technology) and the individual - based on the underlying notion that it is the exploration of the relationship between the two perspectives that elicits meaning.
Bollas describes his book as a contribution to ‘political psychology’ and a ‘social psychotherapy’, and as an attempt to put psychological insight at the heart of a new kind of analysis of culture, society and history. He bemoans the way commentators tend to ‘shy away; from psychological introspection in explaining the ‘anguish of political phenomena’ and seeks to provide a ‘vocabulary and a set of perspectives that can set the stage for different types of conversations about our predicament’. For example he refers to the paradoxical phenomenon of white working poor Americans identifying with Fox News and pro-Trump billionaires, and suggests that this can be better understood psychologically - as an example of how oppressor and victim will form curious attachments to one another - than by means of socio-economic analysis. If we do not understand the ‘dynamics of this collective ‘charge’, we risk losing contemporary societies to ‘explosive entropy.’ This book is therefore also a call to action, both in and beyond our ‘psychic closets.’ As I have pointed out elsewhere (ref) ‘History tells us that slavery, racial discrimination, sexism, apartheid, colonialism weren’t seen as ‘social problems’ that anyone did enough about until the abolition, civil rights, #metoo, anti-apartheid independence social movements turned them into one.’
Bollas opens his analysis from the belief that in order to understand the present, and think about the future, we need to start with our history, and in the first few chapters he traces the history of the West (USA and Europe) over the last two hundred years. His aim in this is to make sense of how social, political and economic factors eg industrialisation, the horror of two world wars, colonialism, globalisation and technological change shaped the formation of collectively shared states of mind over many generations.
For example, in relation to colonialism, ‘By the 1880s the overwhelming power of Europe over the rest of the world sponsored a manic state of mind; fuelled by self-idealisation, they licensed themselves to ravage the world.’ He wonders, psychologically, how many Europeans allowed themselves to recognise the ‘murderousness’ of this colonialism. The optimism about ‘progress’ to be found in Western society throughout the 19th and 20th Centuries could be accomplished only by splitting, and projecting unwanted parts of self and society into the ‘other’….so when Europe colonized Africa it found its perfect ‘other’: ‘’savages’’ would contain the projective identifications of Europeans’ minds. They were seen to be primitive and violent so that the West could be sophisticated and pure.’ He describes this as a turning away from the reflective life, ‘burying ourselves in our ventures’, oblivious to the exploitation of the working–class and colonised people elsewhere in the world, which were seen simply as manifestations of the ‘natural order of things’’
As a former professor of English, Bollas begins his exploration of the impact of this social history on the fragmentation of inner life via reference to the literature of the early and mid 20th Century - Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, Camus, and Sartre. He portrays Camus’ ‘The stranger’ and Sartre’s ‘Nausea’ as ‘literary derivatives of two World Wars that crippled the soul of the Western self’. In place of the hero, we now have not so much an anti-hero as a negated human being; an absence of self and thought where once existed presence, insight and soul searching’.
I remember reading ‘Nausea’ (1938) and the impact it had on me in my impressionable youth. The main character, Roquentin, spent most of his time in the library (searching for meaning no doubt!). There he met a character whom Sartre named the Autodidact, whose knowledge of literature seemed truly extensive, that was until Roquentin realised that the only authors the Autodidact ever referred to had names, the first letter of which was between a and n, but never o or beyond. Turned out he was working his way through the entire library, from a to z in that order! Reading Bollas I realised that the Autodidact represented Sartre’s negated human being, a self without presence or soul searching, collaterally damaged from world war two. The ‘nausea’ of the title refers to the experience of life’s meaninglessness and absurdity, a characterisation that matches Bollas description of our most recent and current history as an ‘Age of Bewilderment’.
In a series of chapters which focus on how the social, culture shapes the individual, he makes that point that all individual psycho-diagnoses reflect the cultural mentalities of their time. He gives a number of examples, beginning with the emergence of the borderline personality in the middle of the 20th century, characterised by splitting, idealisation and projection. Bollas extends the idea of borderline as a ‘cultural suggestion’, a way of understanding how radical contradictions between ideological positions held within a society can successfully be kept apart, eg Remainers and Leavers about Brexit. It is precisely this borderline social structure that characterised post-war America, and enabled it to continue to idealise itself as the liberator of the free world whilst at the same time sustaining its war machine for the conflicts that followed. The split between the idealised America and the paranoid war-making America, between a country of promise and a country of profound racial prejudice, between its identity as a leader in the global community and an inwardly retreating nationalism, all served to create a profoundly confusing borderline ‘object structure.’
The cultural disinterest in inner life has also led to the formation of a new personality type – which Bollas calls the normopath. Unlike the borderline they are not filled with anger, but rather are those who seek refuge from mental life by immersing immersing oneself in material comfort and a life of recreation, fundamentally disinterested in subjective life. They are abnormally normal – seemingly stable, secure, comfortable and socially extrovert’ Normopathy relates closely to what Mark Fischer (ref) terms hedonic depression, characterised not only by the pursuit of pleasure but also a retreat into displacement activities such as addictive consumption, and a narcissistic withdrawal from ‘society’ and social issues.
In a fascinating chapter entitled ‘Transmissive Selves’ Bollas turns his attention to the shaping of selves by our increasingly technologically mediated world. Regarding the impact of social media he says ‘We may wonder if we have ever before walked so blindly into a mass transformation….with so little idea of where we are going.’ He argues that whereas modern media may seem in some ways to have brought the world closer together, in fact such immediacy has created a disguised form of distance - we are not closer, but further apart. Our lives and selves are based less on immediate experiences and more on those indirect perceptions ‘spawned by the information revolution’
Selfies for example do not reveal the self but rather an ‘other in a solitary act of estranged intimacy’, and when we abandon actuals to communicate with virtuals we are momentarily dissociated. Perhaps, even more fundamentally, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter and the like allow us to become, so to speak, part of the show. As we transmit our private selves to the world, we also become a function of that new technology - what Bollas calls the ‘transmissive self.’ We become both the vehicle of the communication, and ‘extensions of these objects as much as they are extensions of us’ Forebodingly, Bollas suggests that ‘A glance at the android future promises, not depth of communication, but a vision from the mental shadows. ’
In and altogether too short a chapter on the implications for what goes on in the therapy room, I was intrigued by the way Bollas developed Freud’s idea of the return of the repressed (ie the reappearance of unconscious mental content being expressed in a disguised form). Bollas coins the term ‘return of the oppressed’. ‘Wherever there is oppression of any form the oppressed self is forced to find compromised forms of thinking and expression, as a result of that oppression.’ By way of example, Bollas cites the idea of the ‘pseudo stupidity’ of slaves feigning various types of incapacity as a form of resistance, for example by ‘accidentally’ breaking machinery, or appearing unable to follow instructions, ie deliberately committing bungled actions as a defence and protest. ‘Part of the challenge facing the present-day psychologist is how to restore interest in being a subject in the face of oppression’. As a challenge relevant to all TA Fields, Bollas asks ‘What tools can the clinician use to analyse oppression and the ‘return of the oppressed’ in order to help the client find a space and a voice for reflective thought, expression and identity in relation to any form of oppression - racism, sexism, gender identity. (ref Ds CP, Johnson on gender, me on resilience)
Continuing in his shuttling back and forth in the dialectic between the individual and society, Bollas shifts his attention to the impact of Globalisation. Increasingly, and in a multitude of different ways, people have felt profoundly alienated by the world around them and seem to be in retreat from complexity and loss of meaning, seeking refuge in a search for a simplified view of life. This has fuelled the rise in fundamentalism, in protest about being governed by forces outside peoples’ understanding or control. It seems to me that Brexit has thrown up many examples of this pattern, eg ‘get Brexit done’, ‘take back control’ – political mantras that oversimplified complex issues, stirred up widespread fears, and appealed to swathes of voters in the recent general election. As Bollas points out, in the US context, this movement also represented a vote against the elite and remote government in Washington. He suggests that voters shifted from Obama to Trump (similarly, in UK: labour to tory) not because they were attending so much to the policy differences between the two, but because they wanted to ‘take back control’. ‘Emotions, not evidence based ‘facts’ (especially the ones that made people miserable) would be the new criteria for meaning making. If thinking something made you feel better it had to be right; if ideas made you feel worse, then they were bad and to be eliminated’
But, Bollas warns, the refusal to accept the complexity of life and the mind does not come without a price. It corresponds, he suggests, to what Freud meant by the ‘death drive’ - ‘the self’s retreat from a non-familiar world into the enclave of the secluded self.’ In the heat of the moment we can abandon complexity and opt for a simplistic version of reality, a more self- friendly version of things, and one based on paranoid projection onto others. Scapegoating simplifies a highly complex set of fears, and as Bollas emphasises, the group projection easily escapes reflective processes, pointing out that ‘the attack on Baghdad showed very clearly who really had the weapons of mass destruction’ Similarly, in Trumps projective identifications – Mexicans are rapists, fake news, ‘crooked Hilary’ -and his offering of simple solutions to complex matters, he is gauging the feelings of society and ‘organising them into a political rhetoric, which captures paranoid aspects of people’s imagination. Paranoid thinking works because it binds people around powerful feelings, and simplifies complex issues into digestible ones. ‘When political movements are based on paranoid ideas, the group process becomes all the more dangerous, as isolated selves discover there are millions of other people who share the same views. The retreat into paranoia then becomes even more deeply assuring and confirming’
In this way Bollas suggests that certain ideologies can function as ‘emotional and psychic holding environments’, such as in the appeal of the right wing neo-liberal push to reduce the regulatory functions of government. Regulation, they argue, is the enemy of freedom. Government is trying to take something away from us. These are felt, not simply as opinions, but as statements of fact, together with the belief that powerful forces in our world have taken away something that was cherished. This in turn evokes a sense of loss, abandonment and helplessness. ‘Fear, failure and impotence is a cocktail of emotions endemic to the marginalised’ and one of the ways out of this dilemma is to transform helplessness and depression into anger. In this way extremist views may represent a form of emotional, psychic holding in the face of extreme forms of dismay.
Deregulation, he emphasises, doesn’t apply only to the removal of the government’s regulatory functions, but extends more widely into a rejection of all forms of self and social regulation. Trump’s shameless expression of racist and sexist views is a manifestation of what happens when an individual abandons self-regulation. If this becomes widespread, it can result in a society governed by ‘id capitalism and primitive states of mind.’ Confronted by opposing views the paranoid feels under threat. Indeed anyone with opposing ideas is a ‘migrant seeking to cross the borders of the mind.’ This way of looking at things provides the paranoid self with a ‘powerful and pleasurable sense of cohesion in a world that otherwise seems contaminated by its opposite - plurality.’
