Cracking up : the work of unconscious experience / Christopher Bollas.

Includes bibliographical references (p. [257]-258) and index.

1 Communications of the unconscious. 2 A separate sense. 3 Dissemination. 4 Preoccupation unto death. 5 The functions of history. 6 What is this thing called self?. 7 The structure of evil. 8 Cracking up

'...extends his exploration of the inner world of human experience. In his last book, he argued that Freud's vision of the dream process is a model for all unconscious mental experience. Now he suggest that the rhythm of that experience--marked by everyday moments of psychic intensity, to which we respond first by breaking up the various factors that go into them (remembered, bodily, instinctual) and then by recombining them in a new understanding of ourselves--that this unconscious rhythm, fully engaged in, is vital to individual creativity and freedom. It develops what Bollas calls a separate sense, with which we assess the immeasurable, complex meanings of our own experience and become sympathetically attuned to the lives of other people.'

Hardcover