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Thomas Ogden has been at the forefront of psychoanalytic thought for over 40 years, yet he continues to offer fresh insights on psychoanalytic theory and clinical practice. His body of work revolves around introducing new concepts to our conceptual framework, such as “the analytic third” and the “autistic-contiguous position” as well as extending Bion's conceptual framework of dreaming. He also provides close, detailed analysis of clinical interactions - often revealing to the reader how his interior experience shapes, influences and informs the interactions with his patients. Another major theme in his work has been his detailed re-examination of the work of various seminal writings from prominent figures in psychoanalysis who have influenced Ogden's approach to psychoanalysis: e.g., Sigmund Freud, Melanie Klein, Hans Loewald, Wilfred Bion, Harold Searles, Ronald Fairbairn, Susan Isaacs and Donald Winnicott (e.g., Ogden, 1990, 2009, 2012). Some may be familiar with Ogden's ongoing “slow reading” seminars in which the group goes through a reading very slowly, word by word, sentence by sentence, pausing to weigh fully the meaning and feeling tone of each word and sentence (a practice he also engages in with verbatim transcripts of analytic sessions and works of fiction and poetry).
In this article, Ogden is examining Winnicott's (1949) paper, “Mind and Its Relation to the Psyche-Soma”. It was not one of Winnicott's papers I had read previously, and Ogden indicates that he delayed writing about it for more than 20 years because of the complexity of the paper. Naturally, I
encourage also reading Winnicott's original paper, although Ogden provides sufficient excerpts from Winnicott's paper to be able to follow Winnicott's analysis as well as Ogden's interpretation of it.
Ogden introduces Winnicott's paper as “one of Winnicott's most significant contributions” (p. 8). He focuses primarily on Winnicott's conceptualization of “psyche-soma” and the implications of Winnicot