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Thomas H. Ogden. The New Library of Psychoanalysis series, London, Routledge, 2012, 261 pp., £26.99 (paperback), ISBN 978-0-415-69833-7
Ogden, the well-known, original and prolific American psychoanalyst who has been heavily influenced by object relations theory, offers us an interesting experience in this, his latest book. He has selected a number of important papers and has undertaken the task of reading them and annotating them with his understanding, his thinking and his comments, adding at times clinical material from his own work that leads us through the journey of his own reading of these papers. We all know that when we read a paper it stimulates our own thoughts. Ogden invites us to engage with the thoughts which he has in response to these classic papers and in that way invites us to look at any given essay anew, while also having a window onto the mind of a very creative psychoanalytic thinker. He pays particular attention to language, particularly the phrasing and structure of certain sentences, and puts them ‘under the microscope’, exploring how this or that way of saying something gives a certain connotation to the idea, and the thoughts that it conjures up in him. He also defines and expands on the concept of ‘analytic style’, a most interesting concept that refers to each particular analyst's way of practicing analysis.
He starts with a very scholarly and careful annotation of Freud's ‘Mourning and melancholia’ offering an original perspective on one of Freud's central ideas in this paper: the way in which ‘the shadow of the object’ affects the ego. His notes on the central influence of this paper on Freud's theory of narcissism are very stimulating and invite serious thought: he proposes that the ‘lost object’ for the melancholic is, in effect, ‘abandoned’, rather than as might be assumed, ‘abandoning’. This very interesting way of seeing it, I think, adds a particular dimension to Freud's notion of the ambivalent relationship that disturbs normal mo