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.