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In his most remarkable work to date, Reverie and Interpretation: Sensing Something Human, Thomas Ogden quotes Debussy as saying, “Music is the space between the notes.” This work can be likened to a symphony between the thematics of Winnicott, Klein, Bion, Frost, and Ogden. One at first wonders why a poet, Robert Frost, is listed with these analysts. Why he is included is perhaps the centerpiece of this highly innovative and creative work. The Ariadne's thread that runs through Ogden's book is aliveness and humanness, which he seems to proffer for candidacy as supraordinate measures of the success of a psychoanalytic experience. He makes use of poetry, fiction, and literary criticism, in addition to a large body of psychoanalytic literature, to explore the use of language in psychoanalysis. He is particularly interested in the way we succeed or fail at bringing language to life, and life to language, in the analytic dialogue.
Words, written or spoken, are to be met halfway by the reader or listener, who must actively and imaginatively participate in this intersubjective venture. Analysts, as well as analysands, must be encouraged to become “makers of music rather than players of notes.” In a chapter titled “Listening: Three Frost Poems,” Ogden presents us with Frost's advice to read aloud so as to get the feel of the words in our mouths—i.e., the aliveness that resides within the sounds and other physical experiences involved in “saying the lines.”
I found this work to be an eloquent invitation into a new phase of development for psychoanalysis. Though solidly based on classical, Kleinian, neo-Kleinian, Bionian, and Winnicottian foundations, it is nonetheless innovative, daunting, and provocative. The book's title is Reverie and Interpretation, but it is the subtitle, Sensing Something Human, that captures the simple essence of this work, which prefigures a radical change in how we view psychoanalytic theory and technique.
Ogden's contributions are hard to categorize.