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While reading Reclaiming Unlived Life, I kept hearing in the back of my mind lines from Matthew Arnold's 1852 poem, “The Buried Life”: “But often, in the world's most crowded streets/ But often, in the din of strife/ There rises an unspeakable desire/ After the knowledge/ Of our buried life.”
Ogden would agree with this verse, for he sees the longing for knowledge of our buried life as urgent, universal, and a primary reason why people come for psychoanalysis. In Ogden's words, “Each patient brings to analysis—almost always without the words and ideas with which to state it—the feeling that he or she has, in an important sense, died in infancy or childhood … and hopes … work with the analyst will help him or her to reclaim his or her ‘unlived life’” (pp. 10-11).
Perhaps poetry came to mind as well because Ogden himself is deeply drawn to literature. Throughout this book, Ogden gives depth and texture to his ideas by offering richly nuanced clinical illustrations, analyzing short stories, and quoting poetry. All of this would be lovely except that trying to summarize Reclaiming Unlived Life feels almost as barbaric as trying to summarize a poem.
Reclaiming Unlived Life begins and ends with chapters in which Ogden lays out his major ideas. The most essential concept here is that of dream-thinking. Dream-thinking is predominantly unconscious work in which we view our lived experience from a multiplicity of vantage points simultaneously. It goes on continuously, even when we are awake, and is “our most encompassing, penetrating, and creative form of thinking” (p. 27).
Ogden sees us as “insatiable in our need to dream our lived experience in an effort to create personal, psychological meanings” (p. 27),