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“In my mind,” Sigmund Freud confided to Wilhelm Stekel as they hiked through the forests of Berchtesgaden, “I always construct novels, using my experiences as a psychoanalyst; my wish is to become a novelist—but not yet; perhaps in the later years of my life” (Stekel 1950, p. 66). Freud never became a novelist, but in Studies on hysteria (1895)(he observes ruefully that “it still strikes me myself as strange that the case histories I write should read like short stories and that, as one might say, they lack the serious stamp of science” (p. 160).
Other psychoanalysts have become novelists, and their stories raise fascinating questions about the relationship between life and art. Can one tell, from internal textual evidence alone, that the author of a novel is a psychoanalyst? Nietzsche claimed that every philosophy—and every theory—is the confession of its originator, and thus unconscious autobiography. Is the same true of fiction: unconscious autobiography? I wondered about these questions while reading Thomas Ogden's three novels: The Parts Left Out , The Hands of Gravity and Chance , and This Will Do … (2021).
Thomas Ogden is one of the world's most acclaimed psychoanalysts. A graduate of the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute, where he serves on the faculty, he is Director of the Center for the Advanced Study of the Psychoses. A prolific author of more than a dozen clinical books, he has received many honors, including the 2004 International Journal of Psychoanalysis Award for the most important paper of the year; the 2010
Haskell Norman Prize for outstanding achievement as a psychoanalytic clinician, teacher, and theoretician; the 2012 Sigourney Award; and the 2014 Hans Loewald Award for Psychoanalytic Education. Ogden's writings have been translated into nineteen languages. In addition to practicing psychoanalysis, he teaches creative writing in San Francisco. “Depending on the kind of writing I am doing,” Ogden told Nicolas Gougoulis and Katryn Driffiel