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Thomas Ogden presents psychoanalysis in this work in essence as an invitation – ‘an invitation not to be taught, but to discover’. He reflects, ‘After all, psychoanalysis, both as a set of ideas and as a therapeutic method, is from beginning to end a process of thinking and rethinking, dreaming and re-dreaming, discovering and rediscovering’ (p. 1). It is rediscovered afresh in each session in ‘everything’ that the analyst ‘says and does’. Analyst and patient enter into a state of ‘waking dreaming’ each other in conversation with one another and of ‘dreaming up’ each other afresh in a form of mutual reverie.
Waking-dreaming along with ‘reverie’ and ‘free association’ are ‘forms of preconscious waking dreaming’ which is ‘a process making the conscious unconscious’ and thus attributing ‘personal symbolic meaning to our lived experience’ (p. 6). He follows Bion (1962) in formulating that waking-dreaming is ‘making conscious lived experience available to the richer thought processes involved in unconscious psychological work’ (p. 6). It is ‘the process by which we attribute personal symbolic meaning to our lived experience’, and ‘it is not a process of making the unconscious conscious’, that is, ‘making derivatives of the unconscious available to conscious secondary process thinking’ (p. 6).
He illuminates waking-dreaming and dreaming-up through portraying specific examples of his experiences with patients, supervisees, with senior colleagues and when he reads or writes about psychoanalysis.
Then he turns to those situations where waking-dreaming does not occur. At these times, an entirely different order of unconscious mental-emotional experience overwhelms the preconscious process by which we make the conscious unconscious and thereby ‘attribute personal symbolic meaning to our lived experience’. The capacity to dream up within our preconscious a personal symbolic meaning is disrupted and overwhelmed, just as the child's capacity to play might be overwhelmed.
Ogden uses ‘