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After finishing the final pages of Thomas Ogden's new book, Reverie and Interpretation: Sensing Something Human, I put it down with the conviction that remarkable as he is as an analytic author and thinker—his is one of the most original and creative voices in psychoanalysis today—Ogden may have even greater gifts as a literary critic. For the last chapter of his book, devoted to an illuminating discussion of three poems by Robert Frost, constitutes as fine a piece of literary criticism as one is likely to encounter in contemporary writing.
This superb chapter, however, is only one of the gems to be discovered in this new collection of Ogden's. One will find here original thinking, imaginative ideas, a deep and sensitive understanding of language and the effects that it produces on readers and listeners, rich and richly illustrated discussions of case material and challenging reformulations of long-accepted analytic concepts and techniques.
Ogden's approach to analysis is well known to those who have followed his work over the years. For him the heart of the analytic situation lies in the ideas, fantasies, beliefs and shared assumptions that are jointly created by patient and analyst, a phenomenon that he has termed the analytic third (1994). The product of patient and analyst and, like a transitional object, belonging to neither and