Ontological psychoanalysis

Thomas Ogden's name, from 2019, for a dimension of psychoanalysis concerned with being and becoming rather than with knowing and understanding. He contrasted it with epistemological psychoanalysis, which he traced through Freud and Klein, in which the work centres on making the unconscious conscious through interpretation. In ontological psychoanalysis, which he associated chiefly with Winnicott and the later Bion, the aim is to help the patient discover and create who they are and come more fully to life. Insight matters less there than the lived experience of being in the analytic relationship. Ogden presented the two as dimensions of every analysis, held in tension, rather than as competing schools.