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Over the past three decades, Thomas Ogden has been a prolific contributor to the psychoanalytic literature, setting forth in detail and with substantial erudition his particular object-relational conception of analytic theory and practice. The present volume extends that project in a frankly didactic direction as he offers the reader the product of his close readings of the work of important historical figures, from Freud through Bion to Searles, centering his attention on such matters as the Oedipus complex, the role of fantasy in mental function, and the niceties of transference-countertransference interaction.
Characteristically, Ogden begins with instructions to the reader on how to read this book. He emphasizes that he seeks to elucidate what the authors of the respective texts “knew but did not know they knew—how these texts are rich in ways their authors did not consciously intend or understand” (p. 3), and to find “meanings that have been waiting to be found, but have never until the present moment found a reader to discover them” (p. 10, italics added).
Appropriately, his first essay is devoted to a key work of Freud's1 and the origins of object relations theory. Ogden is, of course, respectful both of Freud's writing and of his creative thinking as he develops his well-known constructions about the distinctions between normal mourning and pathological depression. For Ogden, the essential element in Freud's understanding of melancholia is the role of unconscious internal object representations (i.e., ego elements) and of identification with the lost object—what he sees as “a revised model of the mind (which would later be termed object relations theory)” (p. 32). He minimizes what he regards as the “misconception that melancholia, according to Freud, involves an identification with the hated aspect of an ambivalently loved object that has been lost” (p. 24); indeed, the role of aggression in the dynamics of melancholia is scarcely mentioned.
What Ogden finds c