Thomas H. Ogden in conversation with Luca Di Donna

Luca Di Donna: What were the sources of inspiration in your early work that led you to embrace British Object Relation theory of unconscious process? Was it because of theoretical disagreement with the traditional American Ego Psychology or was your own experiential work with patients that led you down this path?

Thomas H. Ogden: Luca, I became interested in psychoanalysis before I had a name for it. My mother was in analysis when I was a young child. She is a very sensitive and intelligent woman, so she didn't talk to me about psychoanalysis, but she did listen to me and speak to me from her experience in analysis. I only acquired a language for the sensibility that she brought to her mothering when, at 16, in high school, I was given a list of books from which to choose three for summer reading. Of the suggested books, I chose Freud's A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis. I can remember beginning to read it on a bus in New York City, and how I became so absorbed that I missed my stop, which didn't bother me at all since it meant that I could read undisturbed for as long as I chose. I was far more taken by the voice in the book than I was by the ideas. The book is written as an imaginary lecture to a skeptical audience. The way Freud speaks to the audience about their doubts and fears concerning what he is saying was far more interesting to me then, and now, than the ideas, for instance the unconscious psychology of jokes or even the unconscious psychology of dreams. It was as if I already knew the content of the ideas - it felt to me that I had been familiar with the idea of the unconscious from the time I learned to talk, perhaps before.

In retrospect, I think that there were two reasons why the voice in the book was what interested me most - probably there were many reasons, but I'll mention only two. First, voice is a literary creation, and I loved Freud's writing as writing. I loved all good writing that my 16 year-old mind could be touched by. The other