Musings on Reading Ogden

It was Adam Rodriguez on Twitter who convinced me to finally start reading Thomas Ogden. (At his recommendation I ordered Coming to Life in the Consulting Room and Rediscovering Psychoanalysis.) It is he who has further tempted (not convinced!) me to proffer, as he put it, some "primary process associations" in response to reading two of Ogden's books. This tempting invitation of his came in response to my saying I felt I needed to let these books steep for a few weeks or months, keeping silent about them. 

But, longing for a break from the tedium of marking nearly 100 mid-terms and essays, I decided to try to flesh out some reactions to Ogden. 

I am increasingly of the view that one is not ready for certain books until a certain time, which time may not be clear for many years, during which books will be attempted and abandoned. One is, moreover, going to read books differently at different periods of one's life, finding in some periods riches in the same books that were overlooked or unimportant on previous attempts. I've had all these experiences on several occasions. Perhaps the clearest recent example is finally being able to read some of Bion. I first learned of him from Nina Coltart, whom I started reading nearly 30 years ago, and to whom I now go back to regularly. Re-reading her is a wonderfully steadying but at the same time refreshing experience, not unlike re-reading Freud. 

Through Coltart, I quickly found my home in the British object relations and so-called Independent/Middle schools, where Bion looms large. But I simply could not make head or tails of the man until about two years ago, when his "Attacks on Linking" and his work on psychosis have proven extremely helpful in clinical work with both schizophrenia and an increasing number of cases of cannabis-induced psychosis. It was only after I started seeing psychotic patients that I could finally understand, almost all at once, what Bion meant by attacks on the links in the patient's mind, between objects, and between patient and psychotherapist. 

I tried, in a similarly desultory fashion, to read Ogden over the last few years. Given how many books he has published, I counted him a substantial figure and thought perhaps I might, some years hence, finally have time and feel inclined to tackle him, but his style, so far as I experienced it in one or two essays, rather put me off. 

Now, however, I am trying to rationalize blowing my remaining book budget for the year to buy all of his books. How can this be?

Firstly, the other clinicians I have found on Twitter have emerged in the last few months as a wonderful community from whom I continue to learn so much, and for whom I am so very grateful. So I trusted Adam's judgment enough to buy two of Ogden's books but then they sat on my shelf for a bit because I was uncertain of whether to begin them now or wait until I get some of the other half-dozen (at least!) books I have on the go finished first. Perhaps, I thought, Ogden really deserves to wait until the Christmas break when I'll have a bit of a clearer head. 

Once again clinical experience interposed itself and all of a sudden I dove in and read both Ogden books within a few days. It was a totally unexpected session with a patient that so deeply rattled me as to crack open some unexpected interior space to read and appreciate Ogden now. 

It was going to be a long five days until supervision the following week to process the session; but in the meantime--awkwardly, my super-ego evenly hovering with ever-attentive guilt at the ready for doing this because I have so many papers to mark and other books I should be finishing first--I found myself at first dipping into and then devouring Ogden's chapters in which he seems almost cheerfully to recommend doing something strange and admittedly uncomfortable: to "dream" the patient and the session, and to present both as a form of "fiction" ("Analytic Writing as a Form of Fiction"). Doing so, he hastens to add, is not a form of falsification, but arises out of the awareness that in sessions without notes or recording (neither of which I do), how do you present what happened afterwards?  

So I "dreamt" the story of this session several times on the treadmill in the following days, and it was very helpful to my own churning and processing of a session which, I said to my supervisor, felt very powerfully and disturbingly like my mind had been invaded in an attempted colonization. My counter-transference images in the session were of my first (last, and only!) MRI some three years ago, which was a nearly unbearable (and equally surprising) experience of captivity. 

The day after this exhausting session, another one with a different patient, I now see, also predisposed me to keep reading Ogden, especially his essay "Destruction Reconceived: On Winnicott's 'The Use of an Object and Relating through Identifications'." (Ogden's essay is masterful and deserves a response of its own. Perhaps I shall return to it again another time.)

I have read, and recently closely re-read, that Winnicott essay, but for all the warmth and light I constantly find in Winnicott, his essay is cold comfort when confronted with someone's vast reservoirs of white-hot rage. I need less theory here than Winnicott offers and more case material to see things in action. (I'm only half-joking when I say that as the product of a Canadian WASP family, mild irritation was the only permissible emotion tolerable in public display.) 

Winnicott, however, offers little of that here. Ogden, however, is more intellectually helpful. But surpassing both in concrete clinical helpfulness, to put it frankly, is being rooted in my own psychoanalytic therapy. My analyst's work with me is firstly grounding me, and then making me a more useful selfobject (to use the one, and only, bit of Kohutian terminology I even pretend to understand) by helping me to discover and create a deeper and wider inner emotional range (she's used the image of a metronome with me once and it's stayed with me as unexpectedly charming) in a quietly stabilizing way that allows for my working with, and not being totally swamped by, e.g., the full-force gales of psychotic mania and great masses of sadistic rage (and much else besides).

But to return for a moment to Ogden, I take him to be helpful to the extent that he suggests that what is destroyed by the child or patient is an image or illusion of the parent or therapist, and being able to sort this out and maintain this understanding is the crucial task during such destructive phases. This essay is so rich and inviting I could say much more about it, but I am now mindful of how long and ponderous and secondary-process-like this is becoming! That was not my intent at all here. 

I fear I cannot but do that in my own way of using, and using up, objects, including especially books. Else why have this blog? If nothing else, blogging is an exercise in indulging my "object hungers" as Sheldon Bach so memorably put it.

To avoid doing more of that here, I think I will just turn Ogden into a Magickal Aphoristical Cannon, shooting out bits that powerfully resonated with me and recording my most immediate thoughts upon reading them:

From Coming to Life in the Consulting Room:

Ogden: "We must invent psychoanalysis for each patient" 

Me: What a relief to know he does that so I don't have to feel guilty about having very different styles with each patient.

Ogden: "It is disturbing to recognize that, despite ourselves, we tenaciously hold to what we feel to be destructive aspects of ourselves, our internal and external parents, and of our social system and culture."

Me: Exactly right. This is why Freud first grabbed my attention in high-school, and why, for all its controversy, I still think his theory of the death drive has unmatched explanatory power. 

Ogden: "In dealing with the aspects of self that have been buried alive, it is of the utmost importance for the analyst to respect the patient's defenses."

Me: Yes. This puts me immediately in mind of Auden's lines from his panegyric for Freud where he writes of how Freud

would have us remember most of all 
to be enthusiastic over the night,
     not only for the sense of wonder
   it alone has to offer, but also
because it needs our love. With large sad eyes
its delectable creatures look up and beg
     us dumbly to ask them to follow:
   they are exiles who long for the future
that lives in our power, they too would rejoice
if allowed to serve enlightenment like him.

Ogden: "When I find myself asking questions that invite secondary process thinking on the part of either the patient or me, I pause to wonder, what is it about the unconscious aspect of what is occurring that is frightening to me?"

Me: Q.E.D.

Ogden: "It is incumbent upon me not to introduce or join the patient in 'parent-blaming'."

Me: Exactly right, and so important to remember with my adolescent patients where sometimes creating and having an enemy we can both hate is just a little too alluring, and a convenient way for me to collude in keeping the hatred safely out of the room. 

Ogden: "Psychic health, to my mind, is a reflection of the degree to which a person is able to genuinely engage in dreaming his lived experience."

Me: I'd get in trouble if I tried this regularly. Most people seem, when I ask about them, to regard nocturnal dreams, if they remember them at all, as some colossal irrelevancy and bizarre waste of time. How can I get them to dream while awake, to dream while in the session, to be curious enough about their day or night dreams to try to remember even fragments of them? American cultural ideals of productivity and efficiency are never so destructive as here, when talking about dreams.

And now for some from Rediscovering Psychoanalysis: Thinking and Dreaming, Learning and Forgetting.

Ogden: "I view it as my role to create...ways of talking with each patient that are unique to that patient in that moment....Talking with patients in the way I am describing requires that the analyst pay very careful attention to the analytic frame."

Me: I'm glad to know I do not have to achieve some weird scrupulous idea of 'consistency' with every patient as though we are in some manualized horror show. I'm also glad he mentions the frame here as that is so important, too, especially with this kind of freedom to be creative in each session. Gabbard's writings, which I've been reading on the frame and boundary violations, are now firmly impressed on my mind along with Ogden's.

Ogden: "It is at all times...the analytic task of helping the patient to become more fully alive to his experience, more fully human." 

Me: Yes! The spirit of Freud and Fromm lives on, and never more necessary in an age of 'skills building' and 'outcome measures.'

Ogden: "The analyst's ability to speak with humility from the uniqueness of his personality, from his own 'peculiar mentality,' lies at the core of what I am calling the analyst's style. It must be apparent by now that style is the opposite of fashion; it is also the opposite of narcissism." 

Me: What a relief! I know this to be confirmed by other research that your own style, and personality, can be a strength. Also humility, which seems to startle and even upset some patients when you tell them quite sincerely you are not an expert on their life and your job is not to 'fix' or 'cure' them. The longing for a guru is so strong in some people it startles and repels me. Perhaps I should do a better job of trying to get them to explore their longing for an authority figure to fix them? 

Ogden: "The analyst's task is first and foremost to allow himself to experience the full emotional intensity of all that he feels in the here-and-now of the analytic experience."

Me: Easier said than done! 

Ogden: "For many years I have enjoyed washing dishes."

Me: So do I! I think it's partly the same reason I enjoy cooking: it's something manual, which is so necessary when you're an academic and a clinician dealing with texts and abstractions and the unconscious world so much of the time. 

In conclusion, I've found Ogden a delightful writer in whom one finds much freedom to think and move. Doubtless I'll be returning to him again another time. (In fact, I had a recent relapse with my Visa card and two more Ogden books are arriving here Monday morning....)