Ogden and Phillips on Reclaiming Unlived Life

I have read all of Adam Phillips' books (that is not a vulgar boast so much as a reflection of deeply ingrained scholarly habits, which are often nearly indistinguishable from semi-obsessive or slightly manic tendencies leading one to devour, and ideally to own, an author's opera omnia); and I have newly set for myself the goal of reading if not all then certainly several more of Thomas Ogden's books, to whom I was introduced this fall. I found his style enchanting, but even more some of his arguments--which I have never encountered in 30 years of reading psychoanalytic authors--are wonderfully capacious and hospitable, allowing me to think things about my own analysis and now my own clinical practice that are freeing--and topped, ever so slightly, with a frisson of the forbidden or, better, the "unthought known." 

It occurs to me that Phillips and Ogden have a lot in common. Surely someone else less dim than I has long ago noticed this? I am always a Johnny-come-lately to these things. 

But there is more than a superficially titular resemblance between the Ogden book I read this week--Reclaiming Unlived Life: Experiences in Psychoanalysis, from 2016--and Phillips' Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life.  Both include (here as elsewhere) liberal and loving lashings from literature and poetry; both write in an often lyrical style; and both hold and expound views that, even at this late stage, still seem somehow to sit uncomfortably within "orthodox" psychoanalysis (if one can still speak coherently of such a thing). I have no data to confirm this, but it remains a strong impression. Nonetheless, I think we're all the richer for their perhaps sui generis views and would not have it otherwise. 

I will say that of all Phillips' books, Missing Out perhaps comes back to mind most readily, and has occasioned very profitable discussion with students in this Covid era. Let me tidy up a few old thoughts about it here, and then set him alongside Ogden. 

The appropriate place to begin is with Phillips flatly declaring that "reality matters because it is the only thing that can satisfy us" (25). This will get developed in the rest of the book's realist, anti-fantasist stance in which Phillips clearly comes out against spending time imagining what could have been--what sort of life we could have had, or worse, could yet have if we but overcome our limitations and frustrations. For to give ourselves over to such disordered fantasizing, to wondering after would-be satisfactions in some imaginary future, is to open ourselves to an endless frustration with our life, which is itself an enormous problem insofar as "frustration may be the thing that we are least able to let ourselves feel"(27); and again: "There is nothing more opaque about ourselves than our frustrations" (28).

Phillips is saying this as an adult, and directing it at his readers who will all presumably be adults. But how much more difficult is this for children and adolescents! How many "conduct disorders" and "adjustment disorders" are the results, at least in part, of an inability to bear frustration? How many arise in response to demands to produce facile "solutions" to our frustrations--which end up serving nobody well? 

One danger of children trying or being required to achieve over-mastery of frustrations, as Phillips hints, but Winnicott made explicit, is that of precocity, famously treated in an essay I wrote about here. On that topic, let me put in a plug for an unjustly neglected but invaluable collection, The Mind Object: Precocity and Pathology of Self-Sufficiency, eds. Edward G. Corrigan and Pearl-Ellen Gordon.

Frustrations, if allowed--as Evagrius recognized long before Freud came along--to take root in our mind can become, as Phillips nicely puts it, "intractable because their satisfaction is too exactly imagined" (32) and as a result "there can only be unrealistic wanting" (33). To have "realistic wanting" seems a good enough goal for therapy as for life. It may well require mourning what is unrealistic, and grieving those wants that can never be satisfied. 

I admit that such too easily imagined satisfactions and unrealistic wantings strike me whenever, as last week, NPR told me that the Powerball had grown to a billion dollars or whatever. Hearing this, on the tedious last stretch of some highway or other, I imagine the house I would build (the library would be multi-tiered, sound-proofed, and have a massive fireplace in it with floods of light from huge windows on all sides; all other design details are trivial and uninteresting), and the scholarships I would endow, and the training program I would build to graduate the finest psychodynamic psychotherapists in the country; and so on. 

But Phillips is not done with our frustrations, and not willing simply to dismiss them because they are too easily imagined. Instead, he says that "We need...to know something about what we don't get" (33). This, of course, immediately raises practical if not moral problems: "But how...would you teach someone to not get it?....Teaching them how not to conform without trying not to conform?" (48-49). 

As an academic and a clinician, I find this is a tricky balance to pull off, and today's undergraduates seem especially frustrated and suspicious as you attempt to do so. With understandable bewilderment, they want to know how it is that they are taking an (often required) course only to be told by the professor that one of his most important goals for them is that they understand more deeply what they do not know, what their blind spots are, and what value uncertainty, ambiguity, and ambivalence all have as scholars of any and all disciplines, but especially psychology. But I try nonetheless to inculcate this in them, saying that if they are the sort of logic choppers and hermeneutic naïfs with a raging and uncontrolled desire for omniscience, who have to know everything and have it mapped out in advance, and cannot find uncertainty anything but paralyzing and disdainful--well, then, they need to exit from a clinical career immediately and go build bridges or something. 

As we teach others about the importance of not always "getting it" we need ourselves to be, as it were, convinced of the benefit of doing so, asking ourselves and others: "In which area of our lives does not knowing, not getting it, give us more life rather than more deadness?" (80). 

Incidentally, these are questions profitably examined from a variety of angles in another unjustly neglected collection, Knowing, Not-Knowing and Sort-of-Knowing, ed. Jean Petrucelli

Since reading this passage in particular, I have often thought of my foolish desire in my 20s that psychoanalysis would grant me access to knowing the entirety of my mind, unconscious drives and all. At the end of a full and successful analysis, there would be no surprises and all would be known and mastered, laid bare to the cool eye of reason. My second analysis has moved me quite unexpectedly away from that desire. I now find it more freeing to not pursue every detail of my mind but instead simply to recognize within myself that "I contain multitudes." That is, I hope, not just some tawdry bit of Whitman on the cheap; nor is it meant to be self-congratulatory in the least, but instead an increasing acceptance of the undrainable reality and complexity of any human mind still living. 

One of Phillips' great lines comes in this book when he says that a good goal for psychoanalysis is to help us "make sense of our lives in order to be free not to have to make sense" (63). In other words, we might have "good enough" insights (Phillips' wrote an early biography of Winnicott, which is decent, but the Rodman bio is much better) into ourselves, and, being content with those, feel free to stop pursuing further insights and instead go off and do something else like write poems or make black raspberry jam. As he puts it here and elsewhere (and this clearly echoes Winnicott), one good therapeutic outcome of analysis is that you can forget your treatment, your "symptoms," and the problematic narratives that brought you in in the first place, and simply get on with living. (I recall with great relief Nina Coltart saying in an off-handed way that she could hardly remember a single word of her multi-year analysis with Eva Rosenfeld.)

Being aware of, and comfortable with, what we do not understand is nowhere more important, Phillips counsels, than with sex: "When it comes to sexuality, we don't get it....It means that when it comes to sex we are not going to get it. We may have inklings about it....We can know the facts of life, but nothing else. We may, as we say, have sex, but we won't get it" (77). And again: "What psychoanalysts mostly know about sex is the strange ineffectuality of so much of their knowledge" (79).

Thinking these things with Phillips is very helpful, I find, to maintaining "evenly hovering," that is non-judgmental attention in any discussions about sex. It seems to shock some patients that I am not shocked when they discuss certain things about their sexual life. So many people come in preloaded with all sorts of judgment, and can hardly sit still if you do not immediately express some kind of stern judgment, or at least mildly clucking distaste, for whatever their "issue" is. They seem startled by having everything welcomed for discussion. I suspect a few of them secretly believe I must be faking it--and silently racing to retch into the rubbish bin as soon as they leave!

Right. So much for Phillips. Onto Ogden.

Reclaiming Unlived Life is a collection of essays, as several of Ogden's books seem to be (and as most of Phillips' books are too). Unlike Phillips' book, Ogden's is not so focused on this theme of the unlived life. The title, in fact, seems to come from a single chapter devoted to a late essay of Winnicott. We will come to that presently. Other chapters range widely. I will confine my thoughts to the first five chapters, and to the last one, with which I start.

That chapter is an interview Ogden gave to Luca Di Donna. It gives interesting background, as one would expect, but perhaps the best nugget--hidden just beneath the surface, and not mentioned explicitly, but seemingly obvious to me--is that Ogden desires no disciples. And perhaps even more impressive is his sangfroid about others using his works and disagreeing with him: "the fact that I don't recognize my own thinking in another person's interpretation of the concept of the analytic third is an event that I welcome because it means that the interpretation of the concept has been nutriment for another person's thinking--that, after all, is the principal point of writing of any sort" (p.169). 

The second gift in this interview is a point Ogden has made in other books: the importance of "tailoring" (not the best word--not a good fit!--but I cannot think of another just now) each treatment to each person to such an extent that each patient finds a very different Ogden. He reports rather cheerfully that he wants and would expect his patients to be astonished if each of them could listen to how different he sounds in speaking to all the others, and far from being disorienting this is a good thing. In other words, Dr Ogden with Patient A would sound very different than Dr Ogden with Patients B through H. 

The final point in this chapter is that knowledge alone is a very poor outcome of therapy. It availeth nought toward psychic change: "There is nothing mutative or growth-promoting about the acquisition of greater knowledge about oneself. What is mutative, I believe, is the experience of oneself in the context of being with another person who recognizes you to be the person you are and the person you are in the process of becoming. (It is precisely this experience that has made my second therapeutic analysis so valuable in such unexpected ways.)

This last chapter, and this discussion in particular, link up very nicely with the first: "Truth and Psychic Change." Here Ogden makes several points, including--to my amazement and relief, being the first time I have heard such a thing uttered--that the fundamental rule of psychoanalysis "compromises the patient's right to privacy, which is necessary for the freedom to dream in session" (p.2). I found, and find, this very freeing. Equally liberating in this regard is his claim in Ch.5 that you can only become a therapist based on your own unique gifts: "you have to respect the uniqueness of your own personality" (p.93) and not rely so much on interpretations and theory and whatever you imbibed from your own therapist. In all these things, and in his other books I read recently, there is a very strong welcome made to individuality and creativity in an atmosphere of radical freedom. I suspect Ogden and Fromm would have been good friends. 

The chapter next explores how to pursue truth in analysis in ways that the patient can bear. If done too soon or too zealously, before trust is achieved, truth will carry little water and may drive the patient backwards. And it might always be a dialogic process--not a top-down "interpretation" imposed by the clinician. 

Ch.3, "Fear of Breakdown and the Unlived Life" is an obvious reference to Winnicott, whose very short 1974 paper "Fear of Breakdown" was published three years after his death. This is the central essay in the book and it seems characteristic of Ogden's peculiar gifts that he can find so much material to comment on so profitably in what was not just an unfinished paper of Winnicott's but also a very short one in its original publication. 

In any event, Ogden says that this paper is one of a half-dozen that have been most influential on his overall thinking--along with essays by Freud, Klein, Loewald, Bion, and Fairbairn (always nice to see that neglected Scotsman get some attention! For more on him, Jock Sutherland's Fairbairn's Journey into the Interior is a decent place to begin.)

Ogden talks about how moving it is to read Winnicott, here as elsewhere. Though he doesn't quite put it like this, I have long felt that you could, through Winnicott's words, gain a strong and felicitous feeling for what it must have been like to be in his warmly welcoming consulting room. Doubtless he would have scandalized many on Twitter by his occasional offer to some patients of a cup of tea, which I find very charming indeed.

This essay, Ogden says (and cf. below my comments on Searles and psychosis), allows you to feel compelled to join Winnicott in getting in touch with our own feelings of fear of breakdowns: "to be an adequate therapist we must make use of our own personal knowledge of 'what it feels like'--what 'insanity' feels like--even though we are not in the full grip of a particular 'detail' of that insanity at a given moment" (p.50). 

For Winnicott, a breakdown begins as a loss of defenses against the psychotic parts of our mind. The crucial difference, he suggests (and Ogden rightly notes how much of this paper is Winnicott thinking aloud in not entirely coherent ways), is that patients fear breakdown now when they lack the "container" or "holding environment" of the mother-infant bond. Ideally, of course the therapist and therapeutic frame provide this, but Winnicott and Ogden both say that the patient needs to know you understand not just their breakdown but feel the fear of it, and have some experience with it. To guard too much against these feelings in yourself will not help your patient and their feelings of being trapped by some "primitive agony."

Ch.4 dares to tackle the hermeneutics surrounding one of the most enigmatic and controversial essays of the last half-century: Bion's infamous "Notes on Memory and Desire," to which I've given not a little attention on here (and here). 

Ogden confesses he's tried to read and understand it for decades without success until he realized Bion did not want people to agree, but instead to think about these questions with him. And the question, Ogden asserts, is not about memory or desire, but about the proper and overlooked role of intuition and the unconscious in the analytic process--which desire and memory can mask and distort. 

Ogden comes close to saying--but does not seem to do so--that the problem with memory and desire is that they are, as it were, a false floor. We might think we are grounded on them, but in reality they cover over a yet deeper level where the truth is more likely to be found (cf. pp.77-78). I catch glimpses of this in my own life when I can allow myself sometimes to try to get behind certain memories or desires to discover that they might not in fact mean what I have long thought they did. (We are, as Phillips might say, too easily satisfied literalists!) If Ogden is correct on this, then it is both a little alarming and a little liberating: alarming because it suggests our capacity for self-deception is much deeper and more thorough-going than first realized; but liberating in that we might not quite be prisoners of our desires after all. This will bear continued thinking about. 

We can circumvent memory and desire, he suggests, by dreaming in the session, by reverie, though to do so may require that "the analyst engage in an act of self-renunciation. By self-renunciation, I mean the act of allowing oneself to become less definitively oneself in order to create a psychological space in which analyst and patient may enter into a shared state of intuiting and being-at-one with a disturbing psychic reality that the patient, on his own, is unable to bear" (p.79). 

This passage immediately put me in mind of working with psychotic and borderline conditions, both of which I have found require that I become for a time something more or other than what I seem to be. I really do think Harold Searles (whom I discussed a bit here) was right that in working with such patients, you have to be willing to allow yourself to be a little bit psychotic--or at least be somewhat comfortably, if only for a time, in the neighborhood of your own psychotic elements. These patients are so split, so fragmented so much of the time, that trying to keep them all together, or to put them together, too soon does not, it seems to me, help them learn how to bear what they cannot bear right now. 

How can you do that--allow yourself to be a little bit psychotic? I doubt I could have even entertained the thought when I was younger. It is not easy, and it can be a little bit frightening. But now I rely heavily on a strong frame along with good supervision, supportive colleagues, and my own psychotherapy. I think having patience is also crucial: if you get in touch with those terrifying psychotic elements, you can do so more easily knowing that (as Christopher Bollas has suggested, among others) it is possible to dip into and out of "madness" without getting stuck in it, and the dark and difficult experiences will pass. (Here I really do believe Ophir's recent arguments that "madness" is on a continuum, and not some radically "other" state or "disease entity" that is totally separate from ordinary human experience). 

 Speaking of schizophrenia and psychotic disorders, I have a half-dozen new books to read over my Christmas break, so I suppose I will have to frustrate my desires to order some more Ogden until I get through at least part of that pile. Of course, my super-ego can sometimes be overpowered or ignored, so who knows. But I will certainly read more of him when I can (and also, come to think of it, write more about Phillips' two newest books).