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E.M. Forster described the poet C.P. Cavafy as a Greek gentleman in a straw hat, standing “at a slight angle to the universe” (Forster 1923, 91). This reminds me – minus the straw hat and Greekness – of how Thomas Ogden stands in relation to the psychoanalytic universe.
Coming to Life in the Consulting Room: Toward a New Analytic Sensibility (Ogden 2022) is an important book. Reading it increases one’s understanding of psychoanalysis – not just one’s knowledge, but one’s understanding of it. A principal theme is the difference between what Ogden calls “epistemological” and “ontological” psychoanalysis, the latter being the “new analytic sensibility” that the title refers to. This seems to me a significant conceptual advance. Ogden says, though, that he only recently found words to express this distinction (10). Clues to what he means by it accumulate through the book, as it seems they did for Ogden in his own thinking. The reader has to sidle up to the book in a similar way. It is no good coming at it head on; the angle from which it is written is part of it.
This book cannot be viewed in isolation from Ogden’s other writings. Its title alone shows that. “Coming to life”, and what it means not to be alive, is a thread running through Ogden’s work. It goes back at least to his paper “Analysing Forms of Aliveness and Deadness of the Transference-Countertransference”, published in 1995. It reappears in the title of his book Reclaiming Unlived Life: Experiences in Psychoanalysis (Ogden 2016). In Coming to Life in the Consulting Room, Ogden sees symptoms as “markers of ‘where the bodies are buried’, that is, where in the psyche and soma certain aspects of a patient’s sense of who she is and who she might become have been exiled and perhaps have died”. He goes on: “The ‘experience of being buried alive’ that I am referring to here is not to be equated with repression or dissociation … By contrast [it] involves loss of the sense of aliveness and ‘the feeling of real’” (4). T