You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Thomas Ogden brings a Proustian sense of reclamation to the perennial question of how to live a life worth living, weighing the psychoanalytic task of finding time again in terms of a sense of aliveness that extends from the primitive reach for life to the most mature reach for meaning. Accordingly, with an emphasis on the patient's being more fully alive and real, more fully himself or herself, Ogden has become increasingly preoccupied in his later work with the question of the meaning of being, distinct from the question of how we acquire our theory of the world.
The preoccupation with being (the reach for life) as distinct from but not in opposition to knowing and understanding (the reach for meaning) comes to the fore in a remarkable series
of pieces written over the past few years and now collected in What Alive Means , the centrepiece of which includes “creative readings” of four of Winnicott's major papers. Elaborating over the course of nine chapters on a tension which lies at the heart of his style of thinking, namely, the “the dialectical tension” (3) between ontological psychoanalysis and epistemological psychoanalysis, Ogden maintains that the former acts as the “matrix” within which the latter unfolds. Set against the backdrop of this creative tension, which, Ogden maintains, applies not only to the analytic encounter, but also to human experience per se, the aim of the chapters overall is to demonstrate what working clinically in the ontological dimension of psychoanalysis means.
Ogden is not a philosopher – he reads philosophy “as a writer” (106); nor do his psychoanalytical findings amount to a contribution to either ontology or epistemology – or to the philosophy of language, for that matter. Rather, as a notable contribution to contemporary clinical thinking, the central argument in these chapters is that while understanding is not a given in our coming into being, being is nonetheless the condition of possibility for understanding. Being in the w