Thomas H. Ogden

Ogden was born in 1946. He trained in psychiatry at Yale and spent a year at the Tavistock Clinic in London before settling in San Francisco, where he practises, teaches and supervises. He has been a supervising and personal analyst at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California and a member of the faculty of the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis. He has also served on the editorial boards of several journals, among them the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, where many of his papers first appeared.

His early books were published by Jason Aronson, beginning with Projective Identification and Psychotherapeutic Technique¹ (1982) and continuing to Conversations at the Frontier of Dreaming² (2001). His later books appeared in Routledge's New Library of Psychoanalysis, from This Art of Psychoanalysis³ (2005) to Coming to Life in the Consulting Room⁴ (2021). In 2013 he published The Analyst's Ear and the Critic's Eye: Rethinking Psychoanalysis and Literature⁵ with Benjamin H. Ogden.

Ogden's paper On Projective Identification⁶ (1979) and the book that followed, Projective Identification and Psychotherapeutic Technique¹ (1982), took up a concept from Klein's work and gave it an interpersonal and clinical reading. He treated projective identification as four things at once: an unconscious fantasy, a mode of communication, a primitive form of object relation and a pathway for psychological change.

He distinguished three phases. The first is a fantasy of putting part of oneself into another person. In the second, interpersonal pressure leads the recipient to feel and act in line with that fantasy. In the third, the recipient processes what has been induced, and the projector can then take it back in modified form. On this account the work the recipient does on what has been put into them is itself a route to change.

Ogden returned to the concept in later books. In Subjects of Analysis⁷ (1994) he described projective identification as a "subjugating third", in which the separate subjectivities of analyst and patient are partly subsumed and then reclaimed. That reading links the early work directly to his later idea of the analytic third.

In On Potential Space⁸ (1985) and The Matrix of the Mind⁹ (1986) Ogden set out a dialectical reading of the object-relations tradition. He recast Winnicott's potential space as a set of dialectical tensions, between fantasy and reality, between me and not-me, and between symbol and symbolised. Within these tensions a symbolising and interpreting subject can come into being. Development, on this account, moves from an "invisible oneness" of mother and infant toward a subjective "three-ness", in which the infant becomes an interpreting subject.

Ogden traced the forms that the collapse of potential space takes in psychopathology: the fantasy object experienced as a thing in itself, a defensive use of reality that forecloses imagination, the fetish object, and a state he called "non-experience". He described the processing of a projective identification as the recovery of a dialectic that had collapsed, tying the two strands of his early work together.

In The Matrix of the Mind he read Klein's paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions as modes of generating experience, not developmental phases to be passed through. In the paranoid-schizoid mode the self is experienced as an object to which things happen. The depressive position marks the birth of a historical subject: a self that experiences itself as the author of its own thoughts and feelings and can live in time with a history. On Ogden's reading the depressive mode never replaces the more primitive one. The two stay in continuous dialectical tension.

In On the Concept of an Autistic-Contiguous Position¹⁰ (1989) and the book of the same year, The Primitive Edge of Experience¹¹, Ogden proposed a third mode, more primitive than both the paranoid-schizoid and the depressive positions. He read British object-relations thinking of the preceding two decades as having begun to explore forms of experience outside those described by Klein, Winnicott, Fairbairn and Bion, and offered the new concept to account for them.

The autistic-contiguous position is a sensation-dominated, pre-symbolic mode of generating experience. It supplies much of experience's sense of boundedness and an early sense of the place where experience occurs. Its characteristic anxiety is an unspeakable terror that this boundedness will dissolve, felt as leaking, falling or dissolving into endless, shapeless space. With clinical illustrations, Ogden discussed the position's principal defences, its ways of organising experience, its forms of object relatedness and its avenues of psychological change. He held that the three positions stand in dialectical relation, each creating, preserving and negating the others.

The concept rests in part on Frances Tustin's clinical work with autistic children, including her accounts of autistic shapes and autistic objects. It also draws on Esther Bick's account of the skin as a primal container, and of the "second skin" formations that arise when it fails. Bick's account informed Ogden's description of the surface sensations that organise the autistic-contiguous mode.

In The Analytic Third: Working with Intersubjective Clinical Facts¹² (1994) and in Subjects of Analysis, published the same year, Ogden proposed that analysis involves three subjectivities. Two are those of analyst and analysand. The third, the analytic third, is created jointly by the two.

He illustrated the idea with two clinical sequences. In the first, the analyst's seemingly private reveries proved to give access to the third, although they might look like narcissistic self-absorption, distraction, rumination or daydreaming. In the second, a somatic delusion of the analyst's and the patient's fantasies about the body became the route to the leading anxieties of the analysis.

Reverie and Interpretation: Sensing Something Human¹³ (1997) extended Bion's idea of maternal reverie into a clinical method. The analyst's apparently stray thoughts, daydreams, feelings and bodily sensations during the session become a way into the analytic third, to be used in forming interpretations.

The essays collected in Conversations at the Frontier of Dreaming² (2001) take their title from metaphors Freud introduced. They place a continuous conversation that each person holds with themselves at the frontier between the unconscious and the preconscious. That conversation is experienced as dreaming in sleep and as reverie in waking life. Psychoanalysis, Ogden proposed, is a form of relatedness designed to make the conversation more audible to both participants. Their dreams and reveries draw on an analytic third that they construct jointly but asymmetrically.

In this view reveries are not glimpses into the unconscious but metaphors for what unconscious experience is like. The analyst takes bearings from what feels most alive and most real in the hour, and speaks to the patient from the reverie rather than reporting it. One essay in the book describes the analysis of a man who had built a defensively overgrown mindedness against frightening bodily experience. Two spontaneous interventions, one of which placed the analyst in a remembered scene as a witnessing third, helped him feel more alive in his body.

From the late 1990s Bion's theories of reverie, container-contained, alpha function and dreaming became the main foundation of Ogden's work.

In On Not Being Able to Dream¹⁴ (2003) he distinguished the inability to dream from the failure to remember dreams. Following Bion, he treated dreaming as the work that alpha function makes possible, in waking life as in sleep. Dreaming creates the differentiation between conscious and unconscious mind. Without it a person cannot tell sleeping from waking, or dreaming from perceiving.

He illustrated the argument with a story by Borges and with an analysis in which a patient's "psychic noise" deprived the analyst of reverie and led to a brief countertransference psychosis. In the course of that analysis the capacity of both participants for genuine dreaming grew. The paper introduced the ideas of undreamt and interrupted dreams that the subtitle of This Art of Psychoanalysis: Dreaming Undreamt Dreams and Interrupted Cries (2005) carries. In that book the analyst's task is to dream the patient's undreamt dreams, so that the patient can dream themselves more fully into existence.

In On Holding and Containing, Being and Dreaming¹⁵ (2004) Ogden separated two ideas he found often confused. On his reading, Winnicott's holding is ontological: it concerns being and time. The mother safeguards the infant's continuity of being and shields the infant from the "not-me" quality of time, and the child gradually internalises this function. Bion's container-contained, by contrast, concerns the processing, or dreaming, of thoughts derived from lived emotional experience. The contained are those thoughts, which are mostly unconscious. The container is the capacity to dream and think them.

The notion of talking-as-dreaming, set out in On Talking-as-Dreaming¹⁶ (2007) and in Rediscovering Psychoanalysis: Thinking and Dreaming, Learning and Forgetting¹⁷ (2009), applies these ideas to patients who cannot dream in the session. Ogden described a loosely structured conversation with the qualities of primary process, including its non sequiturs, about books, films, the origins of words, baseball or the taste of chocolate. Through such talk a patient may begin to dream experience that had been undreamable. One of his two cases concerned an "invisible" patient who began to dream himself into existence.

He attached three cautions to the method. The difference between the roles of analyst and patient must remain felt, the therapeutic aims of the analysis must be kept in mind, and the patient must not be "dreamt up" by the analyst.

The phrase ontological psychoanalysis appears in the title of Ogden's 2019 paper in The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, Ontological Psychoanalysis or "What Do You Want to Be When You Grow Up?"¹⁸. He set the idea out at length in Coming to Life in the Consulting Room: Toward a New Analytic Sensibility⁴ (2021).

There he described a shift he sees in contemporary psychoanalysis. "Epistemological" psychoanalysis is concerned with knowing and understanding the patient; "ontological" psychoanalysis is concerned with being and becoming. Building on Winnicott and Bion, he argued that the mind is better understood as a living process located in the act of experiencing than as a mental apparatus. The aim of analysis, on this view, is to help the patient come more fully to life.

The book reads two late papers by Winnicott, on the feeling of being real and on the use of an object. It describes how Ogden talks with patients and how he dreams the analytic session. It also traces the evolution of analytic theories of mind and considers language and truth in psychoanalysis. Its clinical examples show an analyst reinventing psychoanalysis with each patient.

Close reading of poems, fiction and analytic texts runs through Ogden's work. In Conversations at the Frontier of Dreaming, an essay on voice reads poems by Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens, and treats voice as the way a self comes to life in speech. A second essay sets a close reading of a Frost poem beside an analytic hour, and moves the analyst's question from what something means to what is going on.

Two essays in the same book argue that mourning is not simply expressed but made. The mourner must create something equal to the whole of the relationship to what was lost, and in doing so is enlivened. One essay reads Borges; the other reads "Clearances", Seamus Heaney's elegy for his mother. The book ends with a close reading of Winnicott's "Primitive Emotional Development" (1945). It presents Winnicott as the great English-language writer of psychoanalysis, whose style cannot be separated from what he says.

In Reading Harold Searles¹⁹ (2007) Ogden closely read two papers by Harold Searles, whose frank use of his own feelings with very disturbed patients he counts among his sources. He found in Searles an emotional responsiveness to the transference and countertransference in which conscious and unconscious receptivity are continuous. He also found clinical descriptions honest enough that new theory seems almost to arise from them, as in Searles's rethinking of what a successful analysis of the Oedipus complex involves. Ogden called Searles's way of thinking and interpreting "turning experience inside out": transforming the unseen and unnamed emotional context of experience into words that can be thought and spoken. He saw Searles and Bion as complementary. Searles gives clinical form to Bion's often abstract ideas, and Bion offers a wider theoretical frame for Searles's clinical work.

Creative Readings: Essays on Seminal Analytic Works²⁰ (2012) presents reading as a creative act, in which the reader actively rewrites a text and so makes its ideas their own. It reads Freud's Mourning and Melancholia²¹ as the founding text of object-relations theory, and Susan Isaacs's account of unconscious phantasy as implying a radically revised theory of thinking. It asks why Fairbairn is still worth reading and returns to Winnicott. Two essays address Bion, one his writing and one the style of his clinical seminars. Further chapters take up Hans Loewald's reconception of the Oedipus complex and two papers by Searles.

Ogden's reading of Loewald's "The Waning of the Oedipus Complex", also taken up in Rediscovering Psychoanalysis, recasts the Oedipus complex as a process of taking over and transforming parental authority.

His later writing extends the same concern with form. Coming to Life in the Consulting Room closes with essays on being and becoming in the poetry of Frost and Emily Dickinson, and on analytic writing as a form of fiction. The book written with Benjamin H. Ogden carries the subtitle Rethinking Psychoanalysis and Literature.

Ogden received the International Journal of Psychoanalysis award for the most important paper of the year in 2004 and the Haskell Norman Prize for outstanding achievement in psychoanalysis in 2010. He also received the Sigourney Award in 2012 and the Hans Loewald Award in 2014.

The Sigourney Award's account of his work names the introduction of the analytic third and his use of reverie as leading contributions. It also cites his rethinking of analytic technique, including the fundamental rule, the use of the couch and the analysis of dreams, and the concept of an autistic-contiguous position. Further items are his revised views of the male and female Oedipus complex, and his writing on language, on the analysis of schizophrenic patients and on psychoanalysis and literature. It closes with his readings of seminal works of twentieth-century psychoanalysis.

By then his work had been published in nineteen languages. A Hebrew translation of Coming to Life in the Consulting Room, by Assaf Sharira and edited by Emanuel Berman, was published by Am Oved in 2024.

Reviewers of Conversations at the Frontier of Dreaming praised its attention to language and poetry, and noted some repetition about the analytic third across papers first published separately. Reviewers of Creative Readings remarked on its didactic turn and praised its fresh, evocative prose. His other books include Reclaiming Unlived Life: Experiences in Psychoanalysis²² (2016).