Abstract
Upon beginning this work by Thomas Ogden, the reader is immersed in the author’s analytic field, resembling a waking dream thought of Bion or Ferro, or, to use the author’s word, a reverie. It would thus be presumptuous to be overly descriptive or interpretive, for, as he says over and over, matters in consciousness are in constant evolution—including, of course, pathways to the unconscious unlived life. This evolution appears equally in clinical and theoretical matters, as well as in literary works. Chapters 2 through 7 of this collection are articles first published between 2009 and 2015. The first, on truth and psychic change, is offered in lieu of an introduction; the eighth and last is an interview with a colleague from the author’s institute.
Emerging from Freud and Klein, but especially from Winnicott and Bion, Ogden’s work is internally expansive, making clinically relevant the analyst’s various associational pathways to connect with his analysands. This collection of essays brings the reader face to face with the author’s analytic way of thinking, putting him alongside many contemporary analysts both here in America and abroad. To put it briefly and much too simply, the idea of the unlived life is derived and elaborated from Winnicott’s fear of breakdown and, similarly, the concept of reverie from Bion’s notion of the waking dream thought. Basically, early maternal unavailability, the vicissitudes of separation-individuation, and other early trauma remain unrepresented or ablated in the service of making aspects of ongoing life possible. However, this way of living works at various costs for the fully lived life, costs an effective analysis can reduce or at least provide additional options for managing. To be clear, Ogden is not putting any theoretical or technical rules in place; rather, he is suggesting and enhancing opportunities for readers to increase their receptivity and responsiveness.
The psychoanalytic literature is now replete with ideas concerning the issue of representablility, its various levels and their interaction, and their association with early development and, of course, attachment. For example, going back thirty-five years, Shapiro (2016) refers to the work of Lorenza (1983) that references this theme as a movement from and interplay between prelinguistic representation (scenic and relational) to a dream account and finally the process of naming. Many have followed this road. Ogden’s second chapter identifies three forms of thinking—magical, dream, and transformational thinking—as closely linked to that progression and interplay. The theme leads toward a reduced differentiation and increased interplay between levels of naming, development, and states of consciousness and, of course, between participants. Ogden’s work captures the essence of Bion’s and Ferro’s dream thinking, with the aim of illuminating more and more of the patient’s undreamed experience.
Chapter 3 explores the role of Winnicott’s idea of fear of breakdown. As the mother-infant tie is regularly broken, this breakdown occurs on a regular basis, leading to primitive agony that is painfully (but not necessarily psychotically) reexperienced later in life. For Ogden, the breakdown also obliterates aspects of lived experience that can become real only through reexperiencing it in the analysis. Thus, the theme of reclaiming the unlived life.
In chapter 4, which references Bion’s ideas on memory and desire, Ogden makes the point that the unlived life must be experienced unconsciously in the analysis and in the analyst, rather than in the realm of the current life situation, or consciousness, the latter being a defense against, or another version of, the obliterated life. And here enters the author’s notion of reverie, or waking dreaming: that is, the analyst’s connection with the patient’s breakdown through the analyst’s having himself lost touch with the conscious self. Reverie cannot be started; it comes unbidden and intuitively in concert with the patient.
In chapter 5, written with Glen Gabbard, the authors outline four important ways the clinician becomes a mature analyst. These include the importance of thinking/dreaming one’s lived experience; the need for both isolation and the mind of another that this requires; the importance of dreaming oneself into existence; and, finally, learning how to use the self as a container for the difficult aspects of one’s own psychological life. Each of these ways is elaborated with personal and clinical examples.
In the next two chapters, Ogden turns to the life and works of Kafka and Borges to highlight and expand ways of thinking and experiencing consciousness and to expand and deepen less conscious pathways to the unlived life. Each of these essays integrates these authors’ literary works with the sociocultural context in which they wrote. The subtitle of the Kafka chapter references his short story “A Hunger Artist,” a work that includes biographical material and suggests the role of profound deprivation in the etiology of that unlived life. What is emphasized is the enormously painful cost of being aware and being alive. The Borges essay, whose subtitle references his “Library of Babel,” takes his view of the wonder and joy of finding words, their range of meaning, and their role in the experience of consciousness of both reader and writer.
As I suggested in beginning this review, any account of Ogden’s work is a starting point for the experience he offers and into which he invites the reader’s associations. In the last chapter, a conversation with a colleague, Ogden outlines in more concrete terms the pathways that led him to where he currently resides. For those who have not spent much time with his work, this collection is a stimulating jump-start to catching up. For me the book was more a sentence-turner than a page-turner, and I unconditionally recommend it.