You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
I should begin by declaring my bias. I think Thomas Ogden is one of the most interesting and rewarding American writers about psychoanalytic theory and therapy. His earliest published piece (1976) is a minor gem in the literature of psychotherapy with university students. He went on to write two books (1982, 1986) which drew on his experience at the Tavistock Clinic and are, respectively, the best explication to date of the notion of projective identification and the best available description of the Kleinian viewpoint for an American audience. His writing is both straightforward and supple. At his best he has a wonderful capacity to weave theory and therapy together. In reading him you have the experience which superb teachers provide (the case conference comments of Erikson and Anna Freud come to mind): Theoretical concepts do not stand apart, waiting to be imposed on the patient, but rather the theory exists as the natural and inevitable framework for understanding a human struggle.
I do not intend to summarize the contents of Dr. Ogden's newest book. For those who want a summary there is the recent review in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis (King, 1990)—a review which gets the title of the book wrong, but gets the contents right enough. Instead, I wish to comment briefly on the structure and major concerns of the book and then, I hope, prepare an interested reader by touching on a few of the inevitable difficulties in reading this book and on some of what I think Ogden is up to.
I think this book can be confusing until one gets the framework clear. It naturally falls into several different pieces, linked, the publisher hopes, by the umbrella of the title, but in fact mainly linked by the author's orientation and point of view. The introduction is numbered Chapter 1 and it should be: The