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In this clinical paper, Thomas Ogden peers through the lens of over four decades of psychoanalytic experience to advance the Bionian-inspired notion that the analyst helps the patient ‘dream previously “undreamt” and “interrupted dreams” by dreaming the session with the patient.’ He suggests, ‘Psychoanalysis was, for millennia, a thought without a thinker, long predating Freud when seen as the primordial human need for self-understanding.’ Ogden too gives rise to a previously unthought thought when he turns Freud’s conception of dreaming on its head, suggesting instead that ‘dreaming is not a process of making the unconscious conscious … (but rather) the conscious unconscious … (by) transforming … rational experiences with external objects into internal object relationships’. (thus making them) ‘available for unconscious psychological work.’
Perhaps this is an example of what Mitchell (1993, p. 33) suggests is Ogden’s decentering of the psychoanalytic subject (from consciousness) toward its ultimate location in intersubjective space. Reis (1999, p. 379), in an earlier paper, proposes that Ogden’s resituating of the Freudian psychoanalytic subject represents a significant move akin to the shift from Descartes to Merleau-Ponty, now emphasizing preconscious instead of chiefly conscious processes.
Ogden approaches this enigmatic subject, not to capture and conquer it like pinning a butterfly to corkboard through a formulaic technique, but to more deeply appreciate its multivalent qualities. Remembering the dream upon waking, he says, is not necessary for psychic growth, but rather core development becomes possible in correlation with one’s ‘capacity to unconsciously think his lived experience’ and in accordance with the amount of support one receives ‘in containing his undreamable thoughts.’
In what may be an expression of Ogden’s main underlying credo, he compares this rich ‘dream thinking’ to daytime stars that ‘continue to emit light even when … rendered invisible by th