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This is another fine work from the author of acclaimed earlier books such as Projective Identification and Psychotherapeutic Technique, The Matrix of the Mind and The Primitive Edge of Experience. Ogden has acquired a reputation for taking current concepts in theory and technique, explicating them with exceptional clarity and then creatively elaborating upon them. Although he is American and based in San Francisco, the psychoanalytic sources he draws upon are very largely British, especially in the Kleinian tradition; his period as an associate at the Tavistock Clinic was obviously very fruitful. The influence of Bion is clear. In previous books he has explored the concept of projective identification and has postulated a third psychic position, the autistic-contiguous, juxtaposed to the Kleinian paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions. In this book he ‘attempts in different -ways to explore a conception of psychoanalysis as a unique form of dialectical interplay of the individual subjectivities of analyst and analysand’. He writes of the ‘analytic third’, the unique events in the consulting room, to which both parties contribute, but which each experiences differently. In this respect, Ogden has much common ground with the ‘intersubjectivity’ emphasised by post-Kohutians such as Stolorow, even though the tradition they draw upon is profoundly different.
Ogden argues that whilst Freud presented the decentring of the subject from consciousness, it is not correct to state that the real subject is located in the unconscious - but rather in the dialectical interplay between consciousness and unconsciousness. He goes on to explore the dialectical dimensions of Klein's theories, the interplay between the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions, these being not linear stages of development but psychological organisations which each provide a context for the other, neither having meaning except in relation to the other. He also considers how the concept of projective i