Rediscovering Psychoanalysis: Thinking and Dreaming, Learning and Forgetting

A collection of essays published by Routledge in 2009 in its New Library of Psychoanalysis. Its central idea is that an analyst can develop a style of their own, a living way of practising that grows largely out of their personality and experience, by attending to their own idiosyncratic ways of thinking, feeling and responding to patients. Thomas Ogden approaches this from four vantage points: those of clinician, supervisor, teacher and reader of psychoanalysis. He begins with the creation of psychoanalysis afresh in the session through talking-as-dreaming, then turns to supervising and teaching psychoanalysis in a way unique to each supervisee and each seminar group. The book continues his close readings of seminal analytic works, extending the work of Bion, Loewald and Searles. Its chapters address Bion's clinical seminars and his four principles of mental functioning, a reconception of the Oedipus complex, and the writing of Harold Searles.