Conversations at the Frontier of Dreaming

Conversations at the Frontier of Dreaming (2001) collects eight essays by Thomas H. Ogden, most of them first published in journals between 1997 and 2001, around one question: how the analyst can listen to, and speak from, the unconscious life that analyst and patient create together. The title essay draws on metaphors Freud introduced and places at the frontier between the unconscious and the preconscious a continuous conversation that each of us holds with ourselves, experienced as dreaming in sleep and as reverie in waking life. Psychoanalysis, Ogden proposes, is a form of relatedness designed to make that conversation more audible to both participants, and the dreams and reveries of the pair draw on the analytic third, an unconscious experience they construct jointly but asymmetrically. "Reverie and Metaphor" describes how he works: he orients himself by what feels most alive and most real in a session, and treats his own seemingly mundane and private reveries as metaphors for what is happening unconsciously between the two, speaking to the patient from them rather than reporting them. The next essays carry this listening into language. "A Question of Voice", reading poems by Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens, treats voice as the way a self comes to life in speech and links the overtones of analytic speech to the third. "'The Music of What Happens' in Poetry and Psychoanalysis" 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 on mourning argue that mourning is not simply conveyed but made: it asks the mourner to create something equal to the whole of the relationship to what was lost, and in doing so it enlivens. One reads Jorge Luis Borges's "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" and "Borges and I"; the other reads "Clearances", Seamus Heaney's elegy for his mother. "Re-Minding the Body" recounts an analysis of a man, neglected and sexually abused in childhood, who had built a defensively overgrown mindedness against frightening bodily experience. During a regression, two spontaneous interventions helped him feel more alive in a minded body: a protective parental voice, and an invitation to imagine the scene of abuse with the analyst present as a witnessing third. The book ends with "Reading Winnicott", a close reading of "Primitive Emotional Development" (1945) that presents Winnicott as the great English-language writer of psychoanalysis, whose style cannot be separated from what he says. Reviewers praised the book's attention to language and poetry and noted some repetition, especially about the analytic third, across papers first published separately.