This four hour workshop will discuss Christopher Bollas’ book Catch Them Before They Fall: The Psychoanalysis of Breakdown (Routledge, 2009). All conference participants are asked to have read this book prior to attending.
Bollas will discuss the history of why and how he came to offer extended psychoanalytical sessions to people in either full analysis (four to five times a week) or in psychoanalytical psychotherapy. He will discuss those clinical indications of when a non psychotic patient is having a breakdown, how it offers the possibility of a transformative breakthrough in their treatment, and what the clinician must do to stay ahead of the patient’s regression in the analysis. After a short break the conference will then consist of an open discussion with the group in which it is anticipated that those attending will ask a range of questions from quite practical details to questions ranging over theory.
Christopher Bollas is a Fellow of the British Psychoanalytical Society and the Los Angeles Institute and Society for Psychoanalytical Studies. He is an Honorary Member of the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research in New York.
He has been in clinical practice for fifty years and received his clinical trainings in both the United States and Great Britain. He was a graduate of the Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Training Program at the University of Buffalo (1972), and received an MSW from Smith College in 1973. He trained as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist at the Tavistock Clinic in London and qualified in 1978. He also trained as a psychoanalyst at the Institute of Psychoanalysis in London and qualified in 1977.
He was the first non medical psychoanalyst to serve on the London Clinic of Psychoanalysis (1979-83); Visiting Professor of Psychoanalysis at the Institute for Child Neuropsychiatry, University of Rome (1978-1998); Director of Education at the Austen Riggs Center (1985-87); Professor of English Literature at the University of Massachusetts (1983-87); and Vorhees Professor at the Menninger Clinic.
He has lectured widely in Europe, the USA, South America, Australia, Japan, Israel, and Singapore and gave a keynote speech to the International Psychoanalytical Association in Boston in 2015.
He has published numerous books, from The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known (1987) to When the Sun Burst: The Enigma of Schizophrenia (2016).
