Concept
Dreaming oneself into existence
Thomas Ogden's account, developed from 2003 onwards on the basis of Bion's theory of dreaming, of what analysis is for. Dreaming here is the unconscious psychological work of processing emotional experience, and it goes on in waking life as well as in sleep. Experience a person cannot dream remains as undreamt dreams, which are not experienced at all and show up as psychosomatic or psychotic states, or as interrupted dreams, such as night terrors, where the emotion is too disturbing for dreaming to continue. In the session, the analyst participates in dreaming the patient's undreamt and interrupted dreams, chiefly through reverie. In this way the patient becomes able to dream their own experience and so to become more fully alive and more fully themselves.
Development
2003
introduced by Thomas H. Ogden
The 2003 paper introduces undreamt and interrupted dreams; the 2005 book frames the analyst's task as dreaming the patient's undreamt dreams so that the patient can dream themselves more fully into existence.
In On Not Being Able to Dream (2003);This Art of Psychoanalysis: Dreaming Undreamt Dreams and Interrupted Cries (2005)
Relations
- 2003 introduced by Thomas H. Ogden
The 2003 paper introduces undreamt and interrupted dreams; the 2005 book frames the analyst's task as dreaming the patient's undreamt dreams so that the patient can dream themselves more fully into existence.
- 2003 derives from Alpha function
Undreamt dreams are experience that alpha function has not been able to transform into material for dreaming.
- 2005 derives from Reverie
The analyst's reverie is the main way in which they take part in dreaming the patient's undreamt dreams.
Works
- 2003
In this paper Ogden addresses the inability to dream, which he distinguishes from simply failing to remember one's dreams. Following Bion, he holds that it is the work of dreaming that creates the differentiation of conscious and unconscious mind, not the reverse; a person who cannot dream therefore cannot generate distinct conscious and unconscious experience, and cannot tell sleeping from waking or dreaming from perceiving. He approaches the problem from three directions: theoretically, through Bion's ideas; through a story by Borges that renders, with unusual artistry, what it is like to be unable to dream; and clinically, through a long analysis in which the patient at first produced a profusion of 'psychic noise' the analyst could not use. Over years this left the analyst deprived of reverie and subject to brief episodes of countertransference psychosis. Ogden discusses two sessions in which the analytic work strengthened the capacity of both patient and analyst for genuine dreaming, in sleep and in reverie.
- 2005
This Art of Psychoanalysis: Dreaming Undreamt Dreams and Interrupted Cries
A collection of essays published in 2005 in Routledge's New Library of Psychoanalysis. Thomas Ogden asks why dreaming should be the mind's most important psychoanalytic activity, and proposes a new way of conceiving the part dreaming plays in human psychology. Building on Freud, Klein, Winnicott and Bion, he explores the idea that psychopathology manifests a breakdown in a person's capacity to dream their own experience, and examines how the analyst takes part psychologically in the patient's dreaming. Clinical accounts run through the book, which sets out to convey a humane way of being with patients, not only a set of techniques. Its chapters include the title essay on dreaming undreamt dreams and interrupted cries, a new reading of the origins of object-relations theory, "On Not Being Able to Dream", "What's True and Whose Idea Was It?", a reading of Bion, "On Holding and Containing, Being and Dreaming" and an essay on psychoanalytic writing.
See also
People
References
- On Not Being Able to Dream2003Evidence for a relation
- This Art of Psychoanalysis: Dreaming Undreamt Dreams and Interrupted Cries2005Evidence for a relation