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Sometimes you have the good fortune of becoming a psychoanalyst by learning directly and in person from a great analyst. Even if that great analyst has died, you can still learn from him by going to his writings, where you can intimately experience his thinking and practice. Some analysts would even argue that by immersing yourself in analysts' written legacies, you can know their work better than they knew it themselves. For this to happen, you need to become a creative reader and do what Thomas Ogden models in Creative Readings: Essays on Seminal Analytic Works. A creative reader does with texts what a psychoanalyst does with patients: he senses and gradually comes to know something about the other that has eluded that person. He also allows himself to be “read by the writing” (p. 2)—just as the analyst allows himself to be transformed by a patient—and by giving himself over to the experience of reading gains access to a new part of himself.
In Creative Readings, Ogden evokes the experience of reading and being read by texts that have been constitutive in his own evolution as a psychoanalyst. He chooses Freud's “Mourning and Melancholia” , Susan Isaacs's “The Nature and Function of Phantasy” , W. R. D. Fairbairn's “Schizoid Factors in the Personality” and “Endopsychic Structure Considered in Terms of Object-Relationships” , Winnicott's “Primitive