Rediscovering Psychoanalysis: Thinking and Dreaming, Learning and Forgetting By Thomas H.Ogden, The New Library of Psychoanalysis London & New York:  Routledge, 2009.  184 pp.

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. His current book, Rediscovering Psychoanalysis: Thinking and Dreaming, Learning and Forgetting, 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, 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 when 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 he calls “talking-as-dreaming.” For Ogden, “talking-as-dreaming” is an improvisation, in the form of a loosely structured conversation about virtually any subject in which the analyst participates in the patient's dreaming previously undreamt dreams. In this process, the analyst facilitates the patient's dreaming himself more fully into existence. This is a concept well worth clarifying. When Ogden discusses “talking-as-dreaming,” he insists that much 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 he shows us. 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 and the analytic relationship that the patient needs. Ogden's introduction of the idea of “talking-as-dreaming” neither breaks any rules of psychoanalysis nor