People should read this book by Thomas Ogden when they are young. The drawback of reading it at my age is the gnawing feeling that for too many years one has been reading the psychoanalytic literature the wrong way. For Ogden, reading is anything but a passive act of absorbing an author's ideas. Instead, reading is creatively interactive, so that germinal ideas in the text are able to sprout and grow in the reader's mind. Atypically in our neophilic era, Ogden still values psychoanalytic classics written by our forebears. He sets a worthy model of returning to those classics again and again. Here he discusses classic papers by Freud, Isaacs, Fairbairn, Winnicott, Bion, Loewald, and Searles.