Presentation Review: Civilization and the Discontented by Christopher Bollas

Abstract

A message from Los Angeles – the city of angels. Angels visit humans at times of crucial intervention and this YouTube presentation by the psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas certainly had an impact on my understanding of our current situation of potential collapse in the time of neoliberalism, climate change and the virus Covid-19.  He may be familiar to art therapists through his book ‘The shadow of the object: Psychoanalysis of the unthought known’ (1987), which explores some of the non-verbal aspects of human experience through an object relations lens.