Bruce Fink’s take on Christopher Bollas (it isn’t pretty)
Note that Bollas (1983), who is referenced by many relationalists, tried to co-opt Lacan’s term Other by situating the Other in himself as analyst. He wrote, “It is a feature of our present day understanding of the transference, that the Other source of the analysand’s free association is the psychoanalyst’s countertranference” (p.3). This reduces the triad Lacan presented as crucial to the analytic situation — the analysand’s ego, the Other (as the analysand’s unconscious), and the analyst’s ego — to a dyad, which amounts to a collapse of the symbolic dimension into the imaginary. For example, rather than simply ask his analysand “Helen” why she thought she often lapsed into silence (or what was going through her mind at such times, to see if anything had occurred to her from the Freudian “Other scene” known as the unconscious — the “anderer Schauplatz” that Freud 1900/1958 pp. 48 and 536, borrows from Fechner — or if anyone had ever lapsed into silence like that with her in the past, to see if the pauses were related to her history) Bollas responded to her by saying that it must be difficult for her “to speak to this stranger (the analyst) and … to entrust the simplest things to him” (p. 13). This total presumption on his part is based on his own sense of what it must be like to talk to someone new (many of my analysands, for example, have no such trouble at the outset). Moreover, this interpretation, like several others he made based on his countertransference, had little if any effect, and Helen’s silences only seemed to stop when they were connected the experience of her mother — that is, her history with her mother. Note that this is probably what she would have told him at the outset ( that is, approximately a year earlier) had he simply asked if anyone had ever lapsed into silence like that with her in the past, since it was her mother who had done so. The detour he took via his own subjectivity — that is, his attempt to understand her experience through his own experience of himself with her in the analytic setting — seems quite sterile, requiring him to make a series of guesses based on his own personality and countertranference, none of which really seem to hit the mark. And this detour (this attempt to fathom her subjectivity on the bases of his own subjectivity) is necessitated by his failure to ask one of the most elementary questions imaginable. [Fundamentals of Psychoanalytic Technique: A Lacanian Approach for Practitioners. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2007. Page 149. note 26.]