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In Creative Readings: Essays on Seminal Analytic Works, Thomas H. Ogden, a highly creative psychoanalytic thinker and writer, invites us to join him as he revisits a few of his own favorite pieces of writing by other people. The book is more about reading than about what is read, and it is equally fresh and accessible when exploring territory new to the reader as when covering ground one has been over a hundred times before. Ogden is a wordsmith. Even in his title, the word “readings” functions as both noun and verb: “creative reading” is active and interactive.
While they could serve as companions to the texts discussed, Ogden does not intend his essays to provide a set of secondary sources that would take the place of reading the original. Reading this book is more likely to inspire interest in getting to know the other authors better. However, Ogden is such a good writer that he does sometimes clarify the previously obscure. He demystifies, for example, some of Bion's more cryptic passages so that they glimmer with fresh meaning, in spite of his suggestion that what Bion means is almost beside the point of the experience of reading Bion (p. 98). The experience of reading Ogden writing about reading Bion is an experience of suddenly being able to see what has always been there but has never before been quite so clearly in focus.
There are seven authors whose work Ogden explores: Freud, Isaacs, Fairbairn, Winnicott, Bion (twice), Loewald, and Searles. Although he arranges the chapters more or less in chronological order, he makes no claim to presenting a linear development of object relations or any other theory, or even of his own thinking as an analyst.
While not indifferent to the timeline of psychoanalysis, Ogden is unencumbered by it, attentive instead to the timelessness of great writing. What makes these papers classic is that they are still fresh, still relevant, 25 or 95 years later. As he invites us to join him in conversation with the authors, he also invit