informed by many ideas conveyed through action rather than thinking that become part of our unconscious—has been of particular significance, although other concepts "the transformational object", "violent innocence", "extractive introjection", "psychic genera and the receptive unconscious" and "human idiom" have been widely influential in the clinical field. Free association In the middle 1990s in Being A Character (1992) and Cracking Up (1995) Bollas turned back to Freud's early writing—especially The Interpretation of Dreams—and argued that Freud's writing implicitly assumed a theory of unconscious perception, organisation, and creativity that Bollas integrated and used in his own radical return to Freud, arguing that psychoanalysis is primarily efficacious due to entirely unconscious processes of change. In the 21st century, in Free Association, The Evocative Object World and The Infinite Question, Bollas revived Freud's marginalised theory of free association providing evidence of how and in what ways all people think associatively, revealing—as Freud argued—through the "chain of ideas", or simply how the way people move from one topic to another reveals unconscious processes of thought. In 2010 the journalist Or Ezrati, writing in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, remarked: "Some people see Christopher Bollas as one of the two most important living theoreticians in the world of psychoanalysis". Idiom needs In Being a Character, Bollas also argued that everybody had their own idiom for life—a blend between the psychic organisation which from birth forms the self's core, and the implied logic of the familial way of relating into which we are then raised. As adults, Bollas considered we spend our time looking for objects of interest—human or material—which can serve to enhance our particular idioms or styles of life—perpetually "meeting idiom needs by securing evocatively nourishing objects". Being willing to risk exposure to such transformational objects was for Bollas an essential part of a healthy life: the readiness to be metamorphosed by one's interaction with the object world. The contrast was a refusal of development and self-invention, of open-endedness: the state of psychic stagnation. Bollas saw in what he called the anti-narcissist a willed refusal to use objects for the development of his/her own idiom, and a consequent foreclosure of the true self. The result can lead to what Adam Phillips called "the core catastrophe in many of Bollas's powerful clinical vignettes... being trapped in someone else's (usually the parents') dream or view of the world". Bollas was however well aware of the converse danger