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In addition to his gifts as a writer, clinician, and theoretician, Thomas Ogden is an explosively creative student of tradition. He is continually showing us partially unseen or unexplored areas in treasured readings.
Here, Ogden’s reading of Winnicott and Bion shows us his ongoing evolution as an analyst. As he demonstrates his responsiveness to patients and his reactions to Winnicott, Bion, Robert Frost, and Emily Dickinson, his approach is rarely expository, rather it is a detailing of his coming alive with others and to himself. He embodies Bion’s emphasis on each of us becoming our own unique analyst—an analyst that is created anew with each patient.
As with Ogden’s earlier book, Creative Readings in Psychoanalysis,1 he delves further into some of the theorists who have been most interesting and influential for him, finding his own creative renderings of their work. At the same time, he is developing (perhaps refining) a lifetime of analytic work to reveal some of the most essential principles guiding his listening and responsiveness. This essentialist approach is not meant to universalize from his or anyone else’s deconstructed theory of technique. He continually preserves the uniqueness of the patient-analyst dyad. In fact, this book paradoxically illustrates some of Ogden’s thinking about technique without presenting a theory of technique.
In my reading, Ogden’s intent is to describe his own transit “toward a new analytic sensibility” (p. 1) rather than to schematically illustrate the components of this sensibility. So much of what Ogden describes here is what might be termed, finding the capacity to speak to a patient.
At the heart of the book is Ogden’s tour de force perspective on the works of Winnicott and Bion and their mid-20th century creation of the ontological revolution in psychoanalysis. Ogden wants the reader to know that the ways he is distinguishing between ontological and epistemological approaches are complex. He is making the distinction for