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The allegoric and evocative title of this delightful book is a metaphor in itself, suggestive of largely unknown and uncrossed lands and dialogues stretching
long into the horizon. It is taken from its first chapter, incidentally the only one written specifically for this volume (The following seven chapters have been published as papers in various journals between 1997 and 2000.) It is the author's intention from the very beginning to engage his reader in a conversation, to take him on a moving journey through the dreaming mind of working analyst, across the clinical material, to lead him to experience the liveliness of language, of poetry and analytical writing and to demonstrate how all these can enrich our work.
To begin with, using Freud's topographical model, the author locates his main interest in ‘that metaphorical frontier, the one between the unconscious and preconscious mind’ (p. 7). It follows from there that psychoanalysis is seen as taking place on this frontier, the setting of the sessions creating conditions in which the conversations with oneself can be made accessible to the analyst and analysand. This is the place where he believes the dreams and reveries are generated, where they are constantly at play, moulding and altering each other in perpetual exchange. Ogden (1997) has already extended Bion's original term of reveries in his previous book, Reveries and Interpretations: Sensing Something Human, to include various psychological states such as analyst's narcissistic self-absorption, preoccupations, daydreams, ruminations, sexual fantasizing, and bodily sensations. He sees them as ‘a principal form of representation of the unconscious (largely intersubjective) experience of analyst and analysand’ (p. 38). The readers familiar with this author's work will also recognize his concept of the ‘analytical third’, introduced in his book Subject of Analysis (Ogden 1994); a set of experiences created jointly by the analytic pair within the analytic set