This is an automatically translated description

“The Shadow of the Object” is a thoughtful and extremely aesthetically pleasing book that will be of interest not only to psychoanalysts and other mental health professionals (though primarily, of course, to them), but also to cultural studies, literary critics, art historians, and any reader interested in the deeper nature of human thoughts, actions, and experiences. Combining aspects of Freud's theory of the unconscious mind with the ideas of the British School of Object Relations, Ballas develops the concept of the unthinkable known - the earliest experience of the interaction of the infant's innate structure with the mother andenvironment, traces of which can be observed in individual moods, in moments of aesthetic or mystical enchantment, in the theatre of the dream, and in the attitude of the individual to his or her own self as an object. The unthinkable known is what we always “know”, but have never had the opportunity to think about. The psychoanalytic relationship allows us to do this, at least partially, thus opening up the possibility of transformation.

Christopher Ballas is a Fellow of the British Psychoanalytic Society and the Institute and Society for Psychoanalytic Studies of Los Angeles. Since its first publication, The Shadow of the Object has been published 30 times. This is the first time the book has been published in Ukrainian.