Authority, Agency and Living from One's Core

The Fingerprint of the Self: On Bollas and Idiom

These past few weeks of practice — spanning coaching rooms and leadership teams from Asia to Europe — brought me back, as practice often does, to a question that sits at the heart of this series: what does it mean to live and lead from one's own core? What follows sits at the intersection of theory and practice. This is what I understand praxis to be - the ongoing, living dialogue between theory and practice, each informing and transforming the other, neither complete without the other. This essay is one answer, or the beginning of one.

A Transformational Object

Christopher Bollas writes of the transformational object (Bollas, 1987) — the encounter that does not simply inform but changes us. His work has been transformational for me and has most shaped how I practise, how I inquire, and, over many years, how I see the world.

Christopher Bollas works in the British Independent psychoanalytic tradition and his sensibility is post-modern: resistant to grand theory, attentive to the singular, distrustful of interpretive certainty, and oriented toward ambiguity rather than resolution. His thinking speaks directly to my own gaze on leadership development, on not-knowing as an epistemic stance, on the irreducible particularity of each self, and on the unconscious as a creative intelligence rather than a repository of pathology.

Over the years, different bodies of literature have held me or simply settled into the background as my practice and thinking progressed. Bollas’s influence has stayed. Reading him has often felt closer to reverie than to study, and I have come to understand that this is not incidental. His prose is itself presentational, enacting what it describes - ambiguous, layered, more alive than any single reading can exhaust, often capturing me in the form of its sentences as much as in their content. There is both science and art in his writing, and he is, in the fullest sense of the term he himself gave us, an evocative object, one I keep returning to.

Sarah Nettleton, in her careful mapping of his thought, speaks of a Bollas metapsychology, a coherent underlying theory of mind that his writing carries without always announcing (Nettleton, 2017). Reading him does not always feel like encountering a system. Sometimes it is intellectually precise, a concept arrived at with such clarity that something in the mind shifts. At other times it is closer to standing in front of a Monet, held by the impression before you understand what you are seeing, moved by something you cannot yet name. His concepts are deeply interrelated and his language does not always make this easy. He gestures toward meaning as often as he states it, trusting the reader’s own unconscious process and their own idiom to complete what the words begin. This, I have come to think, is not a limitation of his writing but its own form of self-authorisation, a trust that each reader will make meaning that is specific to them, that no single formulation can or should exhaust. Nettleton’s introduction to his metapsychology is, for many readers, the most useful map into a body of work that resists being mapped.

I have long resisted writing about Bollas directly, not from lack of engagement but from something closer to its opposite; a sense that I will never do justice to the enormity of what he offers, or to the intricate connections between his concepts. I have come to see idiom not simply as a clinical concept but as an ontology, an organising principle, an epistemology, and a way of being in the world that resists reduction to any single formulation. I write about it now to honour the influence it has had on me and on my practice, and in the hope of bringing his work into the hands of other development practitioners — a way of seeing that changes not just how you work but how you live.

Bollas’s work has shaped how I practise but also something larger — how I see my children, my partner, the people I am close to, and how I move through the world. It has become, quite unassumingly, a lens through which I understand what it means to be human and to be part of a larger life process — the self continuously unfolding through the objects, encounters, and transformations it is drawn toward, what Bollas calls the processional nature of life. His ideas arrive most often unbidden, in the midst of a session, in the pause between a client’s words, in life’s most ordinary moments. Evenly hovering attention. The Freudian pair. The role of my unconscious in any encounter. The aesthetic as a form of intelligence. Beyond concepts I apply, they have become, a part of how I see and meet the world.

And perhaps what has stayed with me most is something that runs underneath all of it, a profoundly democratising idea that transformation is not reserved for the consulting room, the crisis point, or the coaching encounter, nor for a certain intelligence, position, or status. It is natural to human beings, always available in the texture of the everyday and the ordinary, if we are willing to pay attention. This saturation of potential and meaning in the ordinary and everyday is where Bollas has perhaps shaped me most quietly, giving a quality of attunement and presence to everyday life, that I try to embody.

The Irreducible Nucleus

Of all the concepts Bollas has given me, the one I return to most is idiom. He first developed the idea in Forces of Destiny (Bollas, 1989), describing it as “the psychic correlate of the human fingerprint” (Bollas, 1997, p. 12). It is not a style, a preference or a personality, but something more fundamental:

We have within us a sense of a nucleus that gives rise to our particular aesthetic in being. We have a sense of our own self-authorship, of something that is irreducible and that determines us. (Bollas, 1997, p. 29)

Idiom is the deep grain of how a person meets the world, selects from it and is transformed by it. It is not simply what happens to a person. It is the particular way they happen to the world.

Through the concept of the evocative object (Bollas, 1992), the person, place, experience or idea that stirs the psyche and calls the self into fuller awareness, Bollas gives us a way of understanding how idiom is elaborated: not in isolation, but through experiencing the world. Self-authorisation, as I described it in my doctoral inquiry (Iyer, 2020), is the enactment of this process - the willingness to bring one’s particular way of being into the room, even when the room has not yet made space for it.

In coaching leaders, this shapes everything. My role is not to install a model of leadership but to create an encounter that evokes what is already there, waiting to be elaborated. It means holding two fingerprints in mind simultaneously, my own and my client’s, oriented always toward the elaboration of theirs.

A Tension I Have Not Resolved

My ontology and epistemology are social constructionist, held within a post-modern gaze. Truth is not discovered but constructed - always partial, relational and contingent. Yet idiom, as Bollas conceives it, seems to belong to a different register. It is not socially constructed but prior to construction itself — a particular way of being that precedes language, relationship and the social world that will eventually elaborate it. The tension between these positions is real. In the interplay between my idiom and the object world, is experience socially constructed, or does idiom elaborate itself independently? I think the honest answer is both, although I do not yet fully understand how these positions coexist.

What I hold, tentatively, is that idiom itself may be existential, something we are before anything happens to us, while its expression is always socially constructed, shaped by the encounters and relationships through which it finds form. I offer this not as a resolution but as a question that continues to accompany my thinking and my practice.

These questions sit beneath every coaching conversation, every facilitation, every attempt to meet another human being in their development. The self is not a problem to be solved. Neither is the other. They are, as Bollas might say, to be elaborated: slowly, partially, always incompletely and always in relation.

What idiom feels like from the inside matters as much as any definition. It is not a concrete thing. I experience it more like a fragrance: something sensed rather than grasped, an impression that accumulates over time, an embodied experience that is felt and held rather than named and pinned down. Like every living thing, it ultimately resists complete description. I expect I will continue inquiring into it for the rest of my life. In many ways, that inquiry is what this writing has been about.

© 2026 Kavitha Iyer. All rights reserved. If you found this useful, please share with attribution. You can find out more about my practice on kavithaiyer.com. Photo from Unsplash.

Further Reading

Bollas, C. (1987). The shadow of the object: Psychoanalysis of the unthought known. Free Association Books.

Bollas, C. (1989). Forces of destiny: Psychoanalysis and human idiom. Free Association Books.

Bollas, C. (1992). Being a character: Psychoanalysis and self experience. Hill and Wang.

Bollas, C. (1997). In A. Molino (Ed.), Freely associated: Encounters in psychoanalysis. Free Association Books.

Nettleton, S. (2017). The metapsychology of Christopher Bollas: An introduction. Routledge.