Cracking up

"In this book, psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas extends his exploration of the inner world of human experience. In his last book, he argued that Freud's vision of the dream process is a model for all unconscious mental experience. Now he suggests that the rhythm of that experience - marked by everyday moments of psychic intensity, to which we respond first by breaking up the various factors that go into them (remembered, bodily, instinctual) and then by recombining them in a new understanding of ourselves - that this unconscious rhythm, fully engaged in, is vital to individual creativity and…