In this elegantly written and often ironic collection of essays, Christopher Bollas continues his exploration of the inner world of human experience. He shows how we develop a separate sense - intuition - through unconscious processes of free association in which meaning is first condensed and then cracked up', extending our ability to communicate with each other. This process occurs informally in our daily lives and formally in psychoanalysis, where it is brought to consciousness. He argues that an increase in our ability to use these already existing unconscious processes leads to an increase in unconscious freedom; in turn this leads to an increase in our capacity for creativity. Bollas also looks at those people, such as the obesessed or preoccupied, who cannot acheive unconscious freedom in this way, and at those so caught up in a pathological structure that they feel their lives are governed by a logic that seems to derive from factors external to the self. In a disturbing analysis of the serial killer he shows how this failure to develop an intuitive sense can arise and later result in a deeply traumatic conclusion.
