Jan Abram
Author of The Surviving Object: Psychoanalytic Clinical Essays on Psychic Survival-of-the-Object
Book Recommendations:
Recommended by Jan Abram
“'Thomas Ogden, whose inspiring and prolific work deepens and widens the very heart of psychoanalysis, makes a new and refreshingly clear proposal in his new book. The distinction between an epistemological psychoanalysis and an ontological psychoanalysis has been evolving and crystallizing since Winnicott’s paradigm-changing writings. This superb collection of essays, with moving and vivid clinical vignettes alongside an evocative, scholarly appreciation of the founding psychoanalytic authors Freud and Klein, exemplifies the meaning of an ontological psychoanalytic practice par excellence. The analyst whose focus lies in the evolution of the Self, for both analyst and analysand, will not only love this book but also feel immensely grateful to Ogden for offering, once again, his breath-taking insights and generative reflections on living and being in the analysing situation and beyond.'” (from Amazon)
by Thomas H. Ogden·You?
by Thomas H. Ogden·You?
Ogden sets out a movement in contemporary psychoanalysis toward a new sensibility, reflecting a shift in emphasis from what he calls "epistemological psychoanalysis" (having to do with knowing and understanding) to "ontological psychoanalysis" (having to do with being and becoming). Ogden clinically illustrates his way of dreaming the analytic session and of inventing psychoanalysis with each patient. Using the works of Winnicott and Bion, he finds a turn in the analytic conception of mind from conceiving of it as a thing―a "mental apparatus"―to viewing mind as a living process located in the very act of experiencing. Ogden closes the volume with discussions of being and becoming that occur in reading the poetry of Robert Frost and Emily Dickinson, and in the practice of analytic writing. This book will be of great interest not only to psychoanalysts and psychotherapists interested in the shift in analytic theory and practice Ogden describes, but also to those interested in ideas concerning the way the mind and human experiencing are created.