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There's psychoanalytic writing, and then there's psychoanalytic writing. We all know the difference. Fortunately, for those of us who continue to find ourselves reading “the literature,” several contemporary psychoanalytic thinkers also happen to be engaging, even intriguing, writers. In their latest books, three of those writers — Bollas, Grotstein, and Ogden — in one way or another all delve into the same subject, the unconscious.
If you believe, like Borges, that:
…no one has claim to originality in literature; all writers are more or less faithful amanuenses of the spirit, translators and annotators of pre-existing archetypes …
then it makes sense that these three “translations” of the unconscious overlap in space and time. In Bollas's (1999) The Mystery of Things, Grotstein's (2000) Who Is the Dreamer Who Dreams the Dream?, and Ogden's (2001) Conversations at the Frontier of Dreaming, each writer creates his own metaphors that recast the fluid relationship between the conscious and unconscious mind — concepts that are, of course, metaphors themselves.
In Conversations at the Frontier of Dreaming, Ogden (2001) situates himself somewhere “between (and within)” (p. 3) the juncture of the preconscious and unconscious, with an eye and an ear toward any manifestations of the unconscious that may arise in the analytic hour. In his clinical material, as well as in his readings of Borges, Frost, Stevens, Heaney, and Winnicott, Ogden sounds the depths by blurring his focus — through “catching the drift” (Freud, as quoted in Ogden, 2001, p. 20) of his own