Book
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.
Main ideas
- At the frontier between the unconscious and the preconscious a continuous conversation with oneself goes on; it is experienced as dreaming in sleep and as reverie in waking life, and the analyst's reveries are his waking dreams.
- Psychoanalysis is a form of relatedness designed to make the conversations at the frontier of dreaming more audible to analyst and patient; the pair's dreams and reveries draw on an analytic third that they construct jointly but asymmetrically.
- Reveries, like every derivative of the unconscious, are not glimpses into the unconscious but metaphors for what unconscious experience is like; the analyst orients himself by what feels most alive and most real in the hour.
- Voice is the way a self comes to life in language; read through poems by Frost and Stevens, the voices heard in analysis carry overtones that arise from the analytic third.
- Listening to a poem and listening in analysis are alike: the analyst attends less to hidden meaning than to the sound and feel of what is going on, the "music of what happens", largely through his own reverie.
- Mourning is a making: it demands that we create something, a memory, a dream, a story or a poem, equal to the full complexity of our relationship to what was lost, and in this we are paradoxically enlivened; Ogden shows this in Borges and in Heaney's elegy "Clearances".
- A patient who had developed a defensively overgrown mindedness against frightening bodily experience came to feel more alive in a minded body and bodied mind after interventions that minded him protectively and placed the analyst in the remembered scene as a witnessing third.
- Winnicott's writing must be read as literature: in "Primitive Emotional Development" the style is inseparable from the ideas, and the reader comes to know them through the experience of reading.
What it shows
Donald Winnicott influenced Thomas H. Ogden
Gallery
Cover of the Karnac Books edition of Conversations at the Frontier of Dreaming by Thomas H. Ogden, 2002