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Thomas Ogden is one of the most creative psychoanalysts of our time. His work, papers, and books are among the most quoted in the world. This book will be a study text for many psychoanalysts, clinical psychologists, and psychotherapists, since it reveals him as an excellent teacher. He repeats his central concepts at key points, using a didactic strategy that induces readers to think and rethink them in various contexts: analysis, supervision, teaching, and writing.
Ogden is a very honest person and psychoanalyst, as he describes the way he works in a session with a patient, sometimes speaking and other times interpreting. He teaches us that “speaking” is something akin to free association or daydreaming, a modality that is almost talking-as-dreaming.
This is a concept well worth clarifying. When Ogden discusses this “talking-as-dreaming,” he insists that close attention be given to the analytic frame and that the setting should never be changed. He also considers that a good deal of analytic experience is required before an analyst may responsibly engage in talking with patients in the ways that he describes. Ogden insists that in participating in “talking-as-dreaming,” it is essential that the difference between the roles of analyst and patient remain a solidly felt presence throughout. Otherwise, the patient would be deprived of an analyst, as well as the needed analytic relationship. An important point in regard to this subject is that Ogden's introduction of the idea of “talking-as-dreaming” neither breaks any rules of psychoanalysis nor makes new rules. He shows us how it is possible to do good clinical work with improvisations that take shape in the context of his analytic work with particular patients and under “particular circumstances.”
Ogden returns to Freud's basic idea that the practice of psychoanalysis is an effort to invent and rethink psychoanalysis anew with each patient. It is a process of thinking and rethinking, dreaming and re-dreaming, discov