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Not since Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment have I read a book through at a single sitting—and that was 35 years ago. I did so again, when I first came across Conversations at the Frontier of Dreaming earlier this year. That being so, I readily agreed to review the book. Now that it is time to do so it, however, I realise how rash an offer that was, for the thrill and immediacy of the experience of Ogden's thinking make it extraordinarily hard to write about his thinking. One's own prose feels, indeed is, plodding and reductionist when it comes to any kind of commentary on Ogden's evocative, ebullient, and idiosyncratic way of putting things, on his lively capacity to draw almost-thoughts up towards the light, to address such elusive and profound matters as creativity, meaning, and unconscious communication.
This is not a way of thinking and writing that can easily be paraphrased or glossed by a reviewer. Ogden must speak for himself, with his own freshness and originality, with his own obvious passion for—and facility with—words, and, above all, with his intense desire, as author, to speak to, to engage with, his reader—to hold a “conversation” with all the multi-faceted richness and significance with which that the word “conversation” is, as the book proceeds, increasingly imbued.
The very first paragraph grips the reader's attention and draws him/her straight in:
This is a book of conversations: spoken, unspoken, and yet-to-be spoken
This review was originally in the August 2003 issue of the Journal of Child Psychotherapy, Vol. 29, No. 2, published by Taylor & Francis, and available online at .
Page 80conversations between (and within) analysts and their patients; imaginary and real conversations (the imaginary ones, such as dreaming and reverie, being often the most real); wordless conversations between poets and the poems they make, and between poems and the readers they make; conversations between feelings and thoughts, and between thoughts and w