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As readers of his previous works know, Ogden (, 1986, 1989) is embarked on an effort to fashion a conceptual dynamic that integrates the works of our psychoanalytic forebears and contemporaries by way of the thesis, antithesis, and synthesis of the Hegelian dialectic — weaving the resulting conversation into carefully crafted, tightly argued dialectical formulations of his own. In the present book he again takes up the analytic
situation, arguing that to think of analyst and analysand as a twosome doesn't quite encompass the intricacy involved.
In his description of his task in Subjects of Analysis, Ogden is wonderfully forthcoming: He is Oedipus at the threshold of the Sphinx. Oedipus's own (Sophoclean) solution, Ogden feels, trivializes the import of the riddle. Although Oedipus gains his way, he fails, in his obdurate blindness (which of course will finally be borne in on him) to see that his neglect of the past — of the import of his wounded feet, of his encounter with Laius at the crossroads — will come back to haunt him. Accordingly Ogden, whose reading this is, forearms himself lest he also make this mistake. He is not a deconstructor. He tries not to tell us what so-and-so really meant or must have meant. He will say that Klein and her school misunderstood her own concept of the positions, only sometimes representing them as dynamic alternatives one for the other, and alternatively setting them up as developmental stage-phases — something Ogden rightfully feels robs them of much of their original value. And he will take note that when the sexual motive, the erotic trope, is omitted in the story of object-relations, we are disconnecting from what is not only the defining element in psychoanalysis, but its singular and vital contribution.
This work of Ogden's has several subjects: Its title is a play on words, meaning topics — then also a parsing of the analytic twosome into an “alterity” embodying an “analytic third.” The topics include a powerful argument fo