This Art of Psychoanalysis: Dreaming Undreamt Dreams and Interrupted Cries

A collection of essays published in 2005 in Routledge's New Library of Psychoanalysis. Thomas Ogden asks why dreaming should be the mind's most important psychoanalytic activity, and proposes a new way of conceiving the part dreaming plays in human psychology. Building on Freud, Klein, Winnicott and Bion, he explores the idea that psychopathology manifests a breakdown in a person's capacity to dream their own experience, and examines how the analyst takes part psychologically in the patient's dreaming. Clinical accounts run through the book, which sets out to convey a humane way of being with patients, not only a set of techniques. Its chapters include the title essay on dreaming undreamt dreams and interrupted cries, a new reading of the origins of object-relations theory, "On Not Being Able to Dream", "What's True and Whose Idea Was It?", a reading of Bion, "On Holding and Containing, Being and Dreaming" and an essay on psychoanalytic writing.