You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Thomas Ogden has in this latest book provided us with several profound meditations on the nature of psychoanalysis, its practice, theoretical underpinnings, and goal. His writing style renders the most complex metapsychological concepts accessible to both general and analytic audiences creating an expansive forum for discourse and exchange with readers. Ogden draws the reader into an intersubjective third space created by contributions from both reader and writer where the readers' own reflections can be in dialogue with the writer leading to new insights into one's internal landscape in relation to the analytic situation. In this third space, analyst and analysand, writer and reader become seekers of truth which will be dreamed in the analysis or daydreamed by the reader while reading. The dreamer who dreams the dream is observed by the dreamer who understands the dream thus creating a thinking space where the unthought, unknown, unknowable, and as-yet-unlived experience is eventually given shape, felt, thought, and spoken in the analysis. Giving shape to the previously foreclosed experience involves a transformative process that results in a psychological shift in one's conceptual/perceptual register to a new and vital order of thinking, feeling, and being which the dreamers experience for the first time. This type of experience can only happen in a state of relatedness between two people.
Ogden introduces a new paradigm for considering the goal of psychoanalysis: reclaiming unlived life. He draws heavily on Winnicott's writings (, Fear of Breakdown) on primitive agonies experienced in the holding environment leading to primal defenses protecting the self against the terror experienced. A return to the unintegrated state, the feeling of falling forever, depersonalization, loss of the sense of the real, loss of the capacity to relate to objects, are defenses protecting the primal self from primitive agonies but at the cost of psychical elaboration and relegation to