Book
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.
Main ideas
- Contemporary psychoanalysis is moving from an epistemological emphasis on knowing and understanding the patient toward an ontological emphasis on being and becoming.
- Following Winnicott and Bion, the mind is understood less as a mental apparatus than as a living process that exists in the act of experiencing.
- The aim of analysis is to help the patient come more fully to life and become more fully themselves, rather than chiefly to arrive at insight.
- The analyst dreams the analytic session and reinvents psychoanalysis with each patient, rather than applying a technique handed down from one generation to the next.
- Close readings of Winnicott's late papers on communicating and not communicating and on the use of an object recast the feeling of being real and the place of destruction in development.
- Language, poetry and analytic writing take part in being and becoming: Ogden reads Frost and Dickinson in this light and treats analytic writing as a form of fiction.
What it shows
- 2019
Thomas H. Ogden introduced Ontological psychoanalysis
Gallery
Cover of the Hebrew translation of Thomas H. Ogden's Coming to Life in the Consulting Room, Lehit'orer lehayim beheder hatipulim, Psychoanalysis series (Am Oved, 2024)
External links
In English
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- Routledge(opens the store’s page in a new tab)