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Reverie and Interpretation comprises eight essays addressing the way in which language can be employed to “convey/capture” the interplay of the “aliveness and deadness” of human experience in the psychoanalytic process. Seven of these essays are based on previously published articles, and the book also draws on four earlier books by Ogden.1, 2, 3, 4
Ogden's psychoanalytic work elaborates and transforms key elements in the thought of Freud, Klein, and writers in contemporary object relations. His personal psychoanalytic purview, discerning eye, and poetic sensibility, however, claim definitive roots in the self-reflective experience of the subject. For Ogden, the subjective experience of knowing and not knowing involves not only the experience of self and other; it also involves the experience of the analytic third, a concept introduced in his earlier works. By means of the analytic third, Ogden intends to reach conceptually and experientially beyond Cartesian dualities, Kleinian “oversimplifications,” and “high abstractions” of ego psychology. He delves into and lingers with subjective and intersubjective experience—as it wells up and is sought out in the interstices of awareness, takes shape and substance in the mind, includes the compelling presence of self and others, and devolves meaning as it comes to be apprehended, known, and shared.
Ogden emphasizes the role of language in this formative process of subjectivity. He states that the attempt to use language to capture and convey the delicate interplay of “aliveness and deadness” in human experience “represents a major challenge to contemporary psychoanalysis” (p. 4). For Ogden, meaningful consideration