Concept
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.
Development
2019
introduced by Thomas H. Ogden
In Coming to Life in the Consulting Room: Toward a New Analytic Sensibility (2021);Ontological Psychoanalysis or “What Do You Want to Be When You Grow Up?” (2019)
Relations
- 2019 derives from O
Ogden traced ontological psychoanalysis to the later Bion's turn from knowing about experience to becoming it, and to Winnicott's emphasis on being.
Works
- 2021
Coming to Life in the Consulting Room: Toward a New Analytic Sensibility
In this book, published in the New Library of Psychoanalysis, Thomas H. Ogden describes a shift he sees in contemporary psychoanalysis, from an "epistemological" psychoanalysis concerned with knowing and understanding the patient to an "ontological" psychoanalysis concerned with being and becoming. Building on Winnicott and Bion, he argues that the mind is better understood not as a mental apparatus but as a living process located in the act of experiencing, and that the aim of analysis is to help the patient come more fully to life. After an introduction on being and becoming, the chapters set out ontological psychoanalysis, read two late papers by Winnicott on the feeling of being real and on the use of an object, describe how Ogden talks with his patients and how he dreams the analytic session, trace the evolution of analytic theories of mind, and consider language and truth in psychoanalysis. The book closes with essays on being and becoming in the poetry of Robert Frost and Emily Dickinson and on analytic writing as a form of fiction. Clinical examples throughout show the analyst reinventing psychoanalysis with each patient. A Hebrew translation by Assaf Sharira, edited by Emanuel Berman, was published by Am Oved in 2024.
See also
People
References
- Coming to Life in the Consulting Room: Toward a New Analytic Sensibility2021Evidence for a relation
- Ontological Psychoanalysis or “What Do You Want to Be When You Grow Up?”2019Evidence for a relation