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.
Thomas Ogden has deepened our understanding of how to make therapeutic use of strong emotional reactions to our patients as much as any contemporary psychoanalytic writer. Thomas Ogden's most recent book is an enjoyable work that is capable of affecting readers in both intellectually challenging and emotionally resonant ways. His writing has long been admired for its incisive and precise explication of topics such as projective identification and the “analytic third” (Ogden, 1979; Ogden, 1994), and the reader gets a healthy dose of his theoretical style. There is also much fresh and playful prose that is highly autobiographical and contrasts substantially from his other work.
Rediscovering Psychoanalysis consists of eight chapters that may best be thought of in two parts. Throughout the first four chapters, we see Ogden looking back and sharing his vast experience as clinician, teacher, supervisor and lifelong student of psychoanalytic practice. The early chapters are largely written in the first person voice, and surveys Ogden's career dating all the way back to his early years of training. These chapters are sprinkled with clinical gems, treasured memories of training, practicing, and how his life as an analyst has affected and informed other personal interests such as fiction and film. The writing is almost conversational, including occasional digressions, as if he remembered something as he was considering his many experiences. For example, at one point he painstakingly explains what a particularly evocative short story by Lydia Davis (2007) entitled “What You Learn About the Baby” taught him about the psychoanalytic process.
The next four chapters are more consistent with earlier works and what many readers have come to expect from Ogden's deep engagement with the canon of psychoanalytic theory. He sets his sights on Bion, Loewald, and Searles, three great clinicians and theoreticians who he wishes to pay homage to by considering what, in his view, elevates them