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Reading this book left me feeling that I had come across one of those rare works which induce us to rethink, in an unaccustomed way, our ideas about mental functioning and the analytic process. Its gentle and unpretentious style leads you by the hand through an array of English and French analytic works which are less familiar to the American reader, such as Klein, Bion, Bollas, Bick, Meltzer, Fairbairn, Tustin and Winnicott, on to Anzieu, Green, McDougall, Chasseguet-Smirgel and, finally, Lacan. This is added to many American writers who are much more familiar.
Ogden achieves his own synthesis of many schools of thought—a task which he had begun in his previous book, The Matrix of the Mind(1986). He effectively accomplishes the task by clarifying some difficult ideas, and then taking from each author the theoretical material which fits analytic clinical experience and infant observations, without asking for a leap of faith. He does it without recourse to thinking of the oedipal conflict in the first year of life, or without recourse to object-seeking as a substitute motivation for drive theory, and without resorting to the abstruse style which makes French writers such as Lacan an object of anathema to the busy reader. In fact, he manages to clarify some Lacanian ideas (in particular the theme of 'The Other' and its role in the separation-individuation and the oedipal phases) and integrates them into his own concepts in a way which makes great clinical sense.
He introduces some new ideas which he fully illustrates with clinical material. I will first list them and later elaborate on them.
1He posits the existence of an autistic-contiguous mode of functioning in addition to the paranoid-schizoid and the depressive modes: all three modes operate in a diachronic as well as synchronic manner.
2He utilizes the dialectic interrelation of these modes to define normality versus pathology.
3He posits the existence of an oedipal-transitional phase as mediating the entry in