'For those familiar with the current as well as the classical theories of psychoanalysis, reading Christopher Bollas’s volume can be a mind expanding experience. Published here with a new preface by Christopher Bollas, The Shadow of the Object remains a classic of the psychoanalytic literature, written by a truly original thinker. In The Shadow of the Object, Christopher Bollas integrates aspects of Freud's theory of unconscious thinking with elements from the British Object Relations School. The spirit of the object as the hand of fate 3. Within the unique analytic relationship, it becomes possible, at least in part, to think the unthought - an experience that has enormous transformative potential. Aspects of the unthought known –the primary repressed unconscious –will emerge during a psychoanalysis, as a mood, the aesthetic of a dream, or in our relation to the self as other.
Bollas has termed this "the unthought known", a phrase that has ramified through many realms of human exploration, including the worlds of letters, psychology and the arts. Most of this experience will never be consciously thought, and but it resides within us as assumed knowledge. In doing so, he offers radical new visions of the scope of psychoanalysis and expands our understanding of the creativity of the unconscious mind and the aesthetics of human character.a During our formative years, we are continually "impressed" by the object world. In The Shadow of the Object, Christopher Bollas integrates aspects of Freud’s theory of unconscious thinking with elements from the British Object Relations School.