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Christine, the most self-sufficient and least sentimental character in Tessa Hadley’s Late in the Day (2019), attempts to console her friend, Lydia, following the sudden death of her husband. Lydia has never been much good at being happy, and when she flinches at the prospect of a life without Zachary, Christine reassures her that “Something will come into being.” It is not the alleviation of misery so much as Christine’s faith in the reclamation of “something” worthwhile that captures the essential aspect of Thomas Ogden’s thinking in Reclaiming Unlived Life. Ogden is explicit about his priorities as a doctor: “I am the patient’s doctor in the broad sense of the word doctor [docēre], not [in] the strictly medical sense … I feel strongly that my responsibility is not to psychoanalysis, but to the patient. My responsibility is to offer the patient the best treatment I can for his particular psychological and physical problems” (180). Ogden challenges the reification of psychoanalysis—one reads him, not least of all, to get one’s priorities right. The offer of treatment, however, is not made primarily on the grounds of amelioration; recovery from illness is conceived more broadly in terms of the analyst helping the patient “reclaim” his or her “unlived life,” that is by developing “a personality system capable of containing the unbearable experience [the patient] has not lived” (11). Reclamation is not a form of reparation. There is no question (in Ogden’s mind, at least) that the analyst is concerned with the outcome of the treatment—and yet simply feeling better is not the measure of a more fully lived life. To the contrary, Ogden has in mind our capacity to experience psychic pain. The emphasis given to the pathos of the Lebenswelt indicates the existential-phenomenological reach of Ogden’s worldview. Human beings have to be something. And the idea that “something” will evolve in the company of a compassionate clinician, that “something will come into being”—a “cre