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Over the past twenty years or so, Thomas Ogden (1982; 1986; 1989; 1994a, b; 1997) has produced an influential series of works that have illuminated, altered, and extended Kleinian thinking. Recently he has been studying the means by which analyst and patient communicate and how therapeutic interaction and influence occur. He has argued (Ogden 1997) that the central aim of analysis is the patient's ability to experience more fully the broad spectrum of human emotions. Ogden believes this aim is best served by creating and maintaining affective immediacy between analyst and patient. Consistent with this, his exposition of his material allows readers to comprehend his clinical approach with a lived immediacy.
In Conversations at the Frontier of Dreaming, Ogden examines the essence of analytic sensibilities and therapeutic interaction. He explores the intricacies of language and the experience of conversations—with conversations referring to language-borne interactions that occur within ourselves, in the interchanges between analyst and patient, between the writer and the written, and between the written and the reader.
The conversations of greatest interest to Ogden concern a dialectic between the expressible and the inexpressible, an ongoing dynamic relationship between opposites that create, fulfill, negate, and preserve one another, each meaningful only in the context of the other, ever tending toward integration yet never achieving it (Ogden 1986, p. 208). The most familiar examples of this dialectic in psychoanalysis are Freud's conception of the interrelationship of conscious, preconscious, and unconscious mental activity (1915) and Winnicott's concept of transitional objects and phenomena. In Ogden's work, the dialectic is found in his concept of the inter subjective analytic third (1994a, 1994b), a dynamically unconscious, intersubjective state, co-constructed by analyst and patient but also reflecting their individual contributions.
Ogden's use of dialectic conve