Book
The Primitive Edge of Experience
What it shows
- 1989
Thomas H. Ogden introduced Autistic-contiguous position
- 1986
Thomas H. Ogden reworked Paranoid-schizoid position
Ogden read Klein's positions as modes of generating experience rather than developmental phases. In the paranoid-schizoid mode the self is experienced as an object to which things happen. He later set it in dialectical tension with the depressive and autistic-contiguous modes.
- 1986
Thomas H. Ogden reworked Depressive position
For Ogden the depressive position marks the birth of a historical subject: a self that experiences itself as the author of its thoughts and feelings and can live in time with a history. He held that it exists in continuous dialectical tension with the more primitive modes, never replacing them.
Frances Tustin influenced Thomas H. Ogden
Ogden based the autistic-contiguous position partly on Tustin's clinical work with autistic children, including her accounts of autistic shapes and autistic objects.
Esther Bick influenced Thomas H. Ogden
Bick's account of the skin as a primal container, and of the 'second skin' formations that arise when it fails, informed Ogden's description of the surface sensations that organise the autistic-contiguous mode.
- 1989
Autistic-contiguous position derives from Paranoid-schizoid position
Ogden modelled the new position on Klein's idea of a position and placed it beneath the paranoid-schizoid as a third, more primitive mode. The three stand in dialectical relation rather than in sequence.