Reclaiming Unlived Life: Experiences in Psychoanalysis

A collection of essays published in 2016 in Routledge's New Library of Psychoanalysis, in which Thomas Ogden uses clinical examples to show how different kinds of thinking can further or obstruct analytic work. Building on Winnicott and Bion, and writing in his own style of "creative reading", he treats unlived life as universal and describes how parts of it can be reclaimed in the analytic experience. The book also takes up the place of intuition in analytic practice and the way an analyst comes to a style of their own. It considers how truth and psychic change bear on each other: how conscious and unconscious efforts to face the truth of experience transform both patient and analyst. It proposes a way of using notions of truth in clinical work and in reading Kafka and Borges. Its chapters treat magical, dream and transformative thinking, the fear of breakdown and the unlived life, Bion's "Notes on Memory and Desire", Kafka's "A Hunger Artist" and Borges's "The Library of Babel", and it closes with a conversation with Ogden.