Conversations [Paperback]

Christopher Bollas presents us with a new literary form in his Conversations: twenty-three unique dialogues to captivate, amuse, and inspire. The psychoanalyst Paula Heimann asked: 'Who is speaking? To whom? About what? And why now?' We speak with the voice and position of many others - mothers, fathers, siblings, teachers - and ordinary conversation therefore stages the history of our interpersonal engagements. Heimann's questions also apply when we talk to ourselves, and our inner dialogues reveal the hidden genius of our private world in which we are both actor and audience, poet and reader, politician and electorate. It's quite a ride, and an art form all of its own. 'This is a very different experience than reading a realistic novel or short story, or even a realistic play. First, it's not clear what this form is - not poetry really, not plays really, not vignettes. Conversations is indeed the best description, but the author is not aiming for verisimilitude. He has cut the dialogue down; it's spare, subtextual. The closest I have read is Beckett. It's like the dialogue in Waiting for Godot.Bollas is known as a psychoanalytic theorist, but he is wearing a different hat here. He has written novels and plays before. You will be missing a lot if you try to read this as psychoanalytic. It is a different category.There are twenty-odd pieces, conversations in the book. The author is not trying to be all deep or disguised. You do get a sense of the actual person behind the pieces. Foibles and idiosyncrasies and all. That's a good thing. Some of the pieces I read through and I was curious about them, but only intellectually. Then there were 5 or 6 that when I read them sensitively, they got me on an emotional level. You get some modernist dialogue like this, and it hits you behind the eyes: it's poignant. It stays with you.''Bollas's beautiful prose and simplicity in explaining psychoanalytic concepts have greatly contributed to my learning and development as a therapil"