Reviews

This Art of Psychoanalysis: Dreaming Undreamt Dreams and Interrupted Cries

Thomas Ogden

London and New York: Routledge, 2005

143 pp., £18.99

This book offers an innovative and individual perspective on the function of dreaming in human emotional development. Thomas Ogden draws and builds on the work of Freud, Klein, Winnicott and Bion in shaping his ideas about the nature of psychological growth and psychopathology; in the course of this exploration he proposes a new reading of the origins of objects relations theory, he considers the question of how truth is arrived at and experienced by the patient and the analyst in psychoanalysis, he discusses the similarities and differences between Winnicott's concept of ‘holding’, and Bion's concept of ‘container-contained’, and he explores the experience of psychoanalytic writing and the reciprocal

relationship between writer and material.

Ogden's work addresses both the art and the science of psychoanalysis in such a way that neither perspective takes precedence, and neither is reduced by the other. His attention to theory frequently clarifies and enriches one's understanding of key concepts, while the thoughtful compassion and imagination with which his work with patients is described do much to bring his thoughts on theory fully to life. Though I say this rather tentatively, there is a quality of unmawkish tenderness in this book captured in his clinical vignettes, his reflections on the experience of Freud and Bion, and his extensive reference to literature and poetry.

Dreaming and not dreaming: here Ogden is working from Bion's theory of dreaming and not being able to dream. In contrast with Freud's ideas about dream-work, which allows derivatives of the unconscious to become conscious, for Bion the work of dreaming is that set of mental operations which allows our conscious, lived experience to be altered so that it becomes available to the unconscious for psychological work of primary importance in bringing about psychol