Christopher Bollas

on the Enigma of Schizophrenia

Christopher Bollas is a member of the British Psychoanalytical Society, the Los Angeles Institute and Society for Psychoanalytic Studies, and Honorary Member of the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research. He is a member of ESGUT, the European Study Group of Unconscious Thought.

Fascinating interview with Christopher Bollas on schizophrenia in which he talks about over-medicating in the United States, the aetiology of schizophrenia, and why it’s so common in urban metropolitan areas:

“mental life is itself precarious”

“people who have schizophrenic experiences are vulnerable to those changes [of latency, childhood, adolescence] and it’s very important to get them back into time and space. When you have a psychotic moment … you start to feel like you don’t exist anymore. Like you’re not in your body anymore.”

“We’re overmedicating in the United States and we have been for a long time. Not just in the field of mental health, but in ordinary medicine itself. Because it’s ‘cost-effective’. It’s meant to be the cheap way.”

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“Are we medicating them to make us feel better?”

On the importance of people talking to other people: “The isolation’s terrible. Be patient: talk to them, keep talking to them, because you want them to get back into the understanding of themselves.”

“The rate of schizophrenia is two and a half times higher in urban metropolitan areas than it is in rural areas. So, it ain’t genetic.”

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Christopher Bollas is the author of The Freudian Moment, The Infinite Question, Hysteria, Catch Them Before They Fall, and Forces of Destiny: Psychoanalysis and the Human Idiom. His latest book, When the Sun Bursts: The Enigma of Schizophrenia, has just been published.

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