Preface to the Chinese edition of The Matrix of the Mind: Object Relations and the Psychoanalytic Dialogue, by Thomas H. Ogden, translated by Yin Yiting. Shanghai:  East China Normal University Press, 2016,  153 pages

This is a fascinating book for me, a psychotherapist who has received quite a lot of training and supervision about contemporary Kleinian approaches along with ideas of other British writers such as Winnicott and Bion, while at the same time feeling attracted to contemporary trends on intersubjectivity in psychoanalysis. I read this book as a rich dialogue between the two.

Ogden opened his book Matrix of the Mind by claiming, “This book is offered as an act of interpretation”, which was a peculiar form of expression for me when I first read it. Only when I reread it recently did I begin to see it as a condensed briefing for a core theme of the book. At the manifest level, Ogden was telling us what he wrote this book for. But the striking aspect of this sentence lies in its paradox that highlights making interpretation an action by the analyst. A core belief about the objective of psychoanalysis, which had changed little in more than a century since Freud published his earliest work, is to help the patient to transform repetitive action into conscious memory with symbolic meaning, by making use of interpretation provided by the analyst. The commonly agreed belief is that talking based on thinking is a more advanced achievement than taking an action. While this developmentally diachronic view may be essentially right, Ogden believes it is not complete.

Ogden has repeatedly conveyed the view that in parallel to a diachronic developmental line of verbal exchange between patient and analyst, there exists a synchronic dimension in which multiple modes of different developmental levels coexist in continuous dialogue. When an analyst offers interpretation, he is on the one hand delivering an outcome of his reverie on his experience with the patient, while on the other hand, he is taking an action towards releasing the tension aroused in the analytic setting. In this act of interpretation, and in every minute of our life as human beings, states of depressive position and paran