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As the title of this collection of papers suggests, Ogden's latest mission is to help us “rediscover” psychoanalysis. He borrows from Bion, here quoted from one of his seminars, to point us in the right direction: “Of
course, we believe as analysts—rightly or wrongly—that analysis is helpful. But that belief is liable to hide from us the extraordinary nature, the mystery of psychoanalysis. Such a lot of analysts seem to be bored with their subject; they have lost the capacity to wonder” (p. 84).
Mystery, wonder, awe: these are the experiences that should invigorate our work. Our sacred task, after all, is to facilitate the rebirth of the individual into a more complete form of human existence. But if this is Ogden's mission, his mission statement urges us to keep two aspects of our work distinct. We must not confuse method (our scientific craft and its reliance on shared ideology) and style (our hermeneutic art and its reliance on individualized history). Ogden's method elaborates what Spezzano (1996) has called the “three faces” of “two-person” psychoanalysis: that is, its developmental, ontological, and epistemological theories. But if much of the text of this book focuses on Ogden's psychoanalytic method (how we develop, how we come into being, how we know), the subtext focuses on his psychoanalytic style (how he uniquely does what he does to facilitate development, existence, and self-knowledge).
In this dichotomy between method and style lies a tension perhaps best captured by the conflict between two approaches to our work: the idiographic (highlighting the unique elements) and the nomothetic (highlighting general, lawlike statements). In this book (by my count his eighth), Ogden leans about as far as he ever has toward the idiographic pole (to the left, perhaps), emphasizing all that is irreducibly unique about the analyst, his or her style, the analysand, and that third entity, the analytic couple. There is something powerfully seductive about this approach