Biomedical subjects

Thomas H Ogden

Publications and source records attributed to Thomas H Ogden.

11 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2006

On teaching psychoanalysis.

Teaching psychoanalysis is no less an art than is the practice of psychoanalysis. As is true of the analytic experience, teaching psychoanalysis involves an effort to create clearances in which fresh forms of thinking and dreaming may emerge, with regard to both psychoanalytic theory and clinical practice. Drawing on his experience of leading two ongoing psychoanalytic seminars, each in its 25th year, the author offers observations concerning (1) teaching analytic texts by reading them aloud, line by line, in the seminar setting, with a focus on how the writer is thinking/writing and on how the reader is altered by the experience of reading; (2) treating clinical case presentations as experiences in collective dreaming in which the seminar members make use of their own waking dreaming to assist the presenter in dreaming aspects of his experience with the patient that the analytic pair has not previously been able to dream; (3) reading poetry and fiction as a way of enhancing the capacity of the seminar members to be aware of and alive to the effects created by the patient's and the analyst's use of language; and (4) learning to overcome what one thought one knew about conducting analytic work, i.e. learning to forget what one has learned.

Dreams↗

PubMed2006

Reading Loewald: Oedipus reconceived.

Loewald's 'Waning of the Oedipus complex' is a watershed paper in the history of psychoanalytic thought. By means of a close reading of Loewald's paper, the author frames, discusses and clinically illustrates his understanding of Loewald's reconceptualization of the Oedipus complex. The principal elements of Loewald's reformulation include: 1) the idea that the tension between the pressures of parental infl uence and the child's innate need to establish his own capacities for originality lies at the core of the Oedipus complex; 2) the notion that oedipal parricide is driven, most fundamentally, by the child's 'urge for emancipation.' Parricide involves a revolt against, and an appropriation of, parental authority; 3) the idea that the child atones for the act of parricide by internalizing a transformed version of the child's experience of the oedipal parents. This results in an alteration of the very structure of the child's self (i.e. in the formation of the superego as the agency of autonomy and responsibility); 4) the notion that, in the child's appropriation of parental authority, he in reality 'kill[s] something vital in them...[thus] contributing to their dying' and to the succession of generations; and 5) the idea that the incestuous component of the Oedipus complex involves, in health, the creation of a transitional incestuous object relationship which, over the course of one's life, mediates the interplay between undifferentiated and differentiated aspects of self and relatedness to others. The author concludes with a comparison of Freud's and Loewald's conceptions of the Oedipus complex.

Child↗

PubMed2005

On psychoanalytic supervision.

The author provides both a theoretical context for, and clinical illustrations of, the way in which he thinks and works as a psychoanalytic supervisor. The analytic supervisory experience is conceived of as a form of 'guided dreaming'. In the supervisory relationship, the supervisor helps the analyst to dream (to do conscious and unconscious psychological work with) aspects of the analytic relationship that the analyst is unable to dream or is only partially able to dream. It is the task of the supervisory pair to 'dream up' the patient, that is, to create a 'fiction' that is true to the supervisee's emotional experience with the analysand. To carry out this work, the supervisor must provide a frame that ensures the supervisee's freedom to think and dream and be alive to what is occurring in the analytic and the supervisory relationship, as well as in the interplay between the two. In one of the clinical illustrations presented, the author illustrates his conception of the importance of the feeling on the part of supervisor and supervisee that (at least occasionally) they have 'time to waste'. Such a state of mind may provide an opportunity for a type of freely associative thinking that enhances the range and depth of what can be learned from the supervisory experience. In another clinical example, the author describes his own experience in supervision with Harold Searles, which contributed to his conception of the supervisory process.

Dreams↗

PubMed2005

On psychoanalytic writing.

Analytic writing constitutes a literary genre of its own. It involves the linking of an analytic idea (developed in a scholarly manner) with an analytic experience created in the medium of language. What makes this literary genre so demanding is that experience--including analytic experience--does not come to us in words. This fact generates a paradox that lies at the core of analytic writing: analytic experience (which cannot be said or written) must be transformed into 'fiction' (an imaginative rendering of experience in words) in order to convey to the reader something of what is true to the emotional experience that the analyst had with the patient. The author discusses a clinical passage from one of his recently published papers in an effort to demonstrate some of the conscious and unconscious thinking that goes into his writing. He then looks closely at the way the language works in a successful piece of theoretical analytic writing. The paper concludes with a discussion of a number of facets of the author s experience with analytic writing including the psychological 'state of writing', which is at once a meditation and a wrestling match with language; experimenting with the form (structure) of an analytic essay; and the question of originality in analytic writing.

Humans↗

PubMed2004

The analytic third: implications for psychoanalytic theory and technique.

The author views the analytic enterprise as centrally involving an effort on the part of the analyst to track the dialectical movement of individual subjectivity (of analyst and analysand) and intersubjectivity (the jointly created unconscious life of the analytic pair--the analytic third). In Part I of this paper, the author discusses clinical material in which he relies heavily on his reverie experiences to recognize and verbally symbolize what is occurring in the analytic relationship at an unconscious level. In Part II, the author conceives of projective identification as a form of the analytic third in which the individual subjectivities of analyst and analysand are subjugated to a co-created third subject of analysis. Successful analytic work involves a superseding of the subjugating third by means of mutual recognition of analyst and analysand as separate subjects and a reap-propriation of their (transformed) individual subjectivities.

Humans↗

PubMed2004

This art of psychoanalysis. Dreaming undreamt dreams and interrupted cries.

It is the art of psychoanalysis in the making, a process inventing itself as it goes, that is the subject of this paper. The author articulates succinctly how he conceives of psychoanalysis, and offers a detailed clinical illustration. He suggests that each analysand unconsciously (and ambivalently) is seeking help in dreaming his 'night terrors' (his undreamt and undreamable dreams) and his 'nightmares' (his dreams that are interrupted when the pain of the emotional experience being dreamt exceeds his capacity for dreaming). Undreamable dreams are understood as manifestations of psychotic and psychically foreclosed aspects of the personality; interrupted dreams are viewed as reflections of neurotic and other non-psychotic parts of the personality. The analyst's task is to generate conditions that may allow the analysand--with the analyst's participation--to dream the patient's previously undreamable and interrupted dreams. A significant part of the analyst's participation in the patient's dreaming takes the form of the analyst's reverie experience. In the course of this conjoint work of dreaming in the analytic setting, the analyst may get to know the analysand sufficiently well for the analyst to be able to say something that is true to what is occurring at an unconscious level in the analytic relationship. The analyst's use of language contributes significantly to the possibility that the patient will be able to make use of what the analyst has said for purposes of dreaming his own experience, thereby dreaming himself more fully into existence.

Dreams↗

PubMed2004

An introduction to the reading of Bion.

The author suggests that a good deal of the confusion that arises in the course of reading Bion derives from the fact that Bion's analytic writing is comprised of two periods of work that involve markedly different conceptions of psychoanalysis. These two periods require of the reader very different ways of reading and generate contrasting experiences in reading. Bion, in passages in Learning from experience (1962) and Attention and interpretation (1970), offers advice to the reader regarding how he would like his 'early' and 'late' work to be read. The author treats the experience of reading these passages as ports of entry into the fundamental tenets underlying Bion's widely differing conceptions of the psychoanalytic enterprise. The experience of reading early Bion generates a sense of psychoanalysis as a never completed process of clarifying obscurities and obscuring clarifications, which enterprise moves in the direction of a convergence of disparate meanings. In contrast, the experience of reading Bion's later work conveys a sense of psychoanalysis as a process involving a movement toward infinite expansion of meaning. The author offers a detailed account of an analytic experience which he discusses from a point of view informed by Bion's work, particularly his late work.

History, 20th Century↗

PubMed2004

On holding and containing, being and dreaming.

Winnicott's concept of holding and Bion's idea of the container-contained are for each of these analysts among his most important contributions to psychoanalytic thought. In this light, it is ironic that the two sets of ideas are so frequently misunderstood and confused with one another. In this paper the author delineates what he believes to be the critical aspects of each of these concepts and illustrates the way in which he uses these ideas in his clinical work. Winnicott's holding is seen as an ontological concept that is primarily concerned with being and its relationship to time. Initially the mother safeguards the infant's continuity of being, in part by insulating him from the 'not-me' aspect of time. Maturation entails the infant's gradually internalizing the mother's holding of the continuity of his being over time and emotional flux. By contrast, Bion's container-contained is centrally concerned with the processing (dreaming) of thoughts derived from lived emotional experience. The idea of the container-contained addresses the dynamic interaction of predominantly unconscious thoughts (the contained) and the capacity for dreaming and thinking those thoughts (the container).

Adult↗

PubMed2003

On not being able to dream.

In this paper, the author explores the phenomenon of not being able to dream (as opposed to not being able to remember one's dreams) from three different vantage points. First, from the point of view of psychoanalytic theory, he discusses Bion's idea that the work of dreaming creates the conscious and unconscious mind (and not the other way around). A person who cannot dream is unable to generate differentiable conscious and unconscious experience and, consequently, lives in a psychic state in which he is unable to differentiate waking from sleeping, dreaming from perceiving. The author then approaches the problem of the inability to dream from the perspective achieved by a literary work. He discusses a Borges fiction that creates, in a singularly artful way, the experience of not being able to dream. Finally, the author utilises the vantage point of a detailed account of a clinical experience to explore what it means not to be able to dream. He describes an initial state characterised by the patient's proliferation of unutilisable 'psychic noise' which, over a period of years, led to the analyst's experiencing 'reverie-deprivation' and brief periods of countertransference psychosis. Two analytic sessions are presented and discussed in which psychological work was done that contributed to an enhanced capacity on the part of both patient and analyst for genuine dreaming - both in sleep and in analytic reverie states.

Countertransference↗

PubMed2003

What's true and whose idea was it?

In this paper, the author explores the idea that psychoanalysis at its core involves an effort on the part of patient and analyst to articulate what is true to an emotional experience in a form that is utilizable by the analytic pair for purposes of psychological change. Building upon the work of Bion, what is true to human emotional experience is seen as independent of the analyst's formulation of it. In this sense, we, as psychoanalysts, are not inventors of emotional truths, but participant observers and scribes. And yet, in the very act of thinking and giving verbally symbolic 'shape' to what we intuit to be true to an emotional experience, we alter that truth. This understanding of what is true underlies the analytic conception of the therapeutic action of interpretation: in interpreting, the analyst verbally symbolizes what he feels is true to the patient's unconscious experience and, in so doing, alters what is true and contributes to the creation of a potentially new experience with which the analytic pair may do psychological work. These ideas are illustrated in a detailed discussion of an analytic session. The analyst makes use of his reverie experience--for which both and neither of the members of the analytic pair may claim authorship--in his effort to arrive at tentative understandings of what is true to the patient's unconscious emotional experience at several junctures in the session.

Expressed Emotion↗

PubMed2002

A new reading of the origins of object-relations theory.

The author presents a reading of Freud's "Mourning and melancholia" in which he examines not only the ideas Freud was introducing, but, as important, the way he was thinking/writing in this watershed paper. The author demonstrates how Freud made use of his exploration of the unconscious work of mourning and of melancholia to propose and explore some of the major tenets of a revised model of the mind (which later would be termed "object-relations theory"). The principal tenets of the revised model presented in this 1917 paper include: (1) the idea that the unconscious is organised to a significant degree around stable internal object relations between paired split-off parts of the ego; (2) the notion that psychic pain may be defended against by means of the replacement of an external object relationship by an unconscious, fantasied internal object relationship; (3) the idea that pathological bonds of love mixed with hate are among the strongest ties that bind internal objects to one another in a state of mutual captivity; (4) the notion that the psychopathology of internal object relations often involves the use of omnipotent thinking to a degree that cuts off the dialogue between the unconscious internal object world and the world of actual experience with real external objects; and (5) the idea that ambivalence in relations between unconscious internal objects involves not only the conflict of love and hate, but also the conflict between the wish to continue to be alive in one's object relationships and the wish to be at one with one's dead internal objects.

Freudian Theory↗