Creative Readings: Essays on Seminal Analytic Works

Creative Readings (Routledge, New Library of Psychoanalysis, 2012) is a book of close readings by the American psychoanalyst Thomas H. Ogden. He re-reads a series of seminal analytic papers by Freud, Susan Isaacs, W. R. D. Fairbairn, Donald Winnicott, Wilfred Bion, Hans Loewald and Harold Searles. His aim is to draw out what each author, in the publisher's phrase, knew without knowing that they knew it, and to develop his own thinking in the process. An opening chapter on how to read the book presents reading itself as a creative act. The reader actively rewrites the text and so makes its ideas their own, much as analyst and patient work with what the session gives them. The chapters then read Freud's "Mourning and Melancholia" as the founding text of object-relations theory, and Isaacs's account of unconscious phantasy as implying a radically revised theory of thinking. Ogden asks why Fairbairn is still worth reading, and reads Winnicott's "Primitive Emotional Development". He offers two essays on Bion, one on reading Bion's work and one on the analytic style shown in his clinical seminars. He reads Loewald's reconception of the Oedipus complex, and Searles's papers "Oedipal Love in the Countertransference" and "Unconscious Identification". Reviewers noted the book's didactic turn and its concern with the Oedipus complex, phantasy and transference–countertransference, and praised its fresh, evocative prose.