Image of Christopher Bollas
CPD Credits
2
Event Type
Live Online Event
Location
Zoom & Recording
Time (UK)
6:00 pm - 8:00 pm
Standard
£50.00
Trainee/NHS
£42.50
Image of Christopher Bollas
Friday, February 6, 2026

Christopher Bollas

Cancelled: A live unscripted lecture on working with Psychosis

With Christopher Bollas

Unfortunately, due to unforeseen circumstances this TR Together event with Christopher Bollas will not be going ahead as scheduled on February 6th 2026. Thank you for your understanding and continued support. We hope to welcome you to future events soon.

Christopher Bollas’ work has been profoundly influential in contemporary psychoanalytic thought, shaping how clinicians understand the unconscious, the mind, and the work of psychoanalysis. He helped shift psychoanalysis toward a more relational, aesthetic, and process-oriented understanding of the mind.  

Bollas will give an unscripted lecture on his understanding of some of the features of psychosis in children, adolescents, and young adults especially in the prodromal period including a few of the therapeutic interventions he has found useful.  He will outline the steps in the process from work in the 1960's with autistic children, to work in the 1980's with hospitalised schizophrenics, to those who were having a breakdown.   

A focus will be given to those clinicians and teachers who helped him understand psychosis during the course of his career. Time permitting, the second part of the talk will be on our relation to the unconscious in which consciousness assumes it understands it's unconscious when this is not so. 

Bollas prefers to speak without a chair person or discussant but will stop at times for some questions to be read out from the Q&A function. This event will be held online, it will be recorded and available two weeks after the event. You will receive a CPD certificate for the 2 hours of the events duration. 

This event will be recorded for those who have purchased a ticket but will not be available in our library of recordings, this is a one chance opportunity!

Programme

Due to unforseen circumstances, this TR Together event with Christopher Bollas will not be going ahead as scheduled on February 6th 2026

Christopher Bollas

Christopher Bollas is an American-born psychoanalyst, psychotherapist, writer, and cultural theorist whose career has bridged psychoanalysis, literary studies, and intellectual history for more than five decades. Alongside his clinical work as a psychotherapist since 1967, Bollas has held significant academic and institutional roles. In the mid-1980s, he served as Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, reflecting his long-standing engagement with literature and cultural theory. Clinically, Bollas’s early work focused on children with autism and schizophrenia, laying the foundation for his later theoretical contributions. He became the first Honorary Non-Medical Consultant at the London Clinic of Psychoanalysis and was a visiting professor in psychoanalysis at the University of Rome’s Institute of Child Neuropsychiatry from 1978 to 1998. From 1985 to 1988, he served as Director of Education at the Austen Riggs Center, an influential psychoanalytic treatment institution. Bollas is internationally renowned for his psychoanalytic writings and is among the most widely read contemporary figures in the field. His concepts most notably the unthought known, along with ideas such as the transformational object and human idiom—have had lasting influence on clinical theory and practice. In addition to his theoretical work, Bollas has contributed to psychoanalytic scholarship as a literary editor of the works of D. W. Winnicott and has written fiction and drama. He became a British citizen in 2010.