Of Knowledge and Mothers: On the Work of Christopher Bollas

2012 ◽  
pp. 108-124 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jacqueline Rose
Keyword(s):  
Christopher Bollas

Repetition and Poetic Process: Bishop’s Nagging Thoughts

2019 ◽  
pp. 132-146
Author(s):  
Deryn Rees-Jones
Keyword(s):  
Aesthetic Response ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
Christopher Bollas ◽  
Compulsion To Repeat ◽  
The Way

This chapter raises important issues about Bishop’s aesthetic response to a double, but crucially different set of traumas during infancy (death of her father and ‘disappearance’ of her mother) and argues that repetition in Bishop’s writing signals specific anxieties about loss. The compulsion to repeat, Freud writes, takes ‘the place of the impulse to remember’. Christopher Bollas’ concept of the ‘unthought known’ is applied to consider Bishop’s negotiation with both what is known and yet cannot be spoken. Drawing closely on Bishop’s original drafts, this chapter offers a close analysis of the poem ‘Questions of Travel’ to think about its wider importance as the title of Bishop’s 1965 volume. In paying particular attention to the way in which the volume’s chronological development can be read in counterpoint to its final order on publication, I argue that in the volume Bishop finds an important aesthetic resolution to set against a biographical narrative.

Towards a new grammar of interiority

2017 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 323-344 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hedwig Schwall
Keyword(s):  
Content Type ◽  
The Real ◽  
To The Lighthouse ◽  
Christopher Bollas ◽  
Internal Objects ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Distinct Object

While critics commenting on To the Lighthouse usually focus on Mrs Ramsay, Lily and gender questions, this article traces the ways in which the mother-son relationship between Mrs Ramsay and James reflect the processes Christopher Bollas distinguishes as a child learns to use objects to develop his own personal idiom. These processes can be further nuanced by using Lacan’s three registers of the Real, the Imaginary and the Symbolic, which, stressing the rhythmical, iconic and verbal aspects of language respectively, each yield distinct object uses. First, James learns to deal with affects, then with emotions and finally with values, thus developing a grammar of interiority. This leads him to his final epiphany of the Lighthouse, linchpin of the three registers, which reveals his idea of self, reconciling paternal and maternal aspects of his internal objects.

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