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Be Ye Who Ye Is Because if you ain't who you Is You ain't who you think You Is
—Lauren Halsey,
The Roof Garden Commission 2023, Metropolitan Museum of Art
Attention to the intersubjective and relational nature of the analytic encounter in its various forms has come to dominate psychoanalytic clinical practice and theoretical discussion for decades now. Coming to Life in the Consulting Room: Toward a New Analytic Sensibility, is a collection of Thomas Ogden's distinctive, influential contributions to this field which have appeared over the past 7 years. In them, Ogden summarizes his clinical and theoretical ideas to argue for analysts to embrace a “new sensibility” in order to do more meaningful and effective work with patients. It asks the analyst to move further away from the more traditional and prevailing stance of discerning and tactfully interpreting unconscious fantasy, or, in Ogden's language, of explaining or understanding what the patient doesn't get. This “new sensibility” is one which makes essential and primary the analyst's achieving the best attunement to the patient's immediate ongoing experience and emotional state. This attunement enables the analyst to avoid staleness and deadness in the encounter and missing what the patient needs most help with. Ogden derives this orientation from the work of Winnicott and Bion; both offered
clinical justification for this new approach as well as describing a basis for a theory of mind superseding the traditional Freudian.
Ogden accurately places himself in the wave of this “movement that has been emerging in psychoanalysis in the past few decades toward a new and generative analytic sensibility—toward new qualities of receptivity and responsiveness to what is occurring in the analytic session” (p. xiv). Thus he holds much in common with the thrust of interpersonal, intersubjective and relational trends, although this version is marked by Ogden's distinctive style of work and retains roots in and partakes of more