8 Theses from Thomas Ogden on Reverie

I have, once more, my friends on Twitter to thank for introducing me to the psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Thomas Ogden, about whom I have recently written here and here. Once I understood his style, and how to respond and work with it, I have found him an enchanting writer. So I decided to keep working my way through his books as time and energy allowed.

The past few days, before being thrown into the whirligig of a new semester, which begins tomorrow, I sat down and read through one of his first books, Reverie and Interpretation: Sensing Something Human (Jason Aronson/Rowman and Littlefield, 1997). Among its several virtues is one I was especially delighted to see: how many times Ogden quotes Nina Coltart, whose work was then brand new but never, then or since, widely known (alas). 

It is in some ways perhaps incommensurate with how Ogden writes and thinks that I have chosen to extract from this book eight "theses," if you will. Perhaps "aphorisms" is a better way to think of these ideas, which are embedded in a book with great masses of clinical material from his patients. I have summed them up in my own words and added a bit of reflection as appropriate.

First, there is no such thing as a mind. This, of course, is Ogden's riff on Winnicott's famous declaration that "there's no such thing as a baby." What both men have in mind to emphasize here is that no mind exists of itself or by itself. A mind, Ogden says, is always created and maintained (as well as harmed) intersubjectively. 

Put negatively, the idea of an "independent mind" existing in its solipsistic splendour, untouched by and not linked to other minds, not only does not exist but, as Bion might say, is a psychotic illusion. 

Second, both minds are different after analysis/therapy. Patient and therapist alike think differently after spending time working together. I am sometimes startled by how much differently my mind works thanks to my patients. I think if I had stuck to my original plan of full-time clinical practice in the 1990s, when I was still in my 20s, I had then a very rigid mind and most likely would have been a rigid and presumably inflexible clinician. Now I feel, with not just training and experience, but my own psychoanalysis and ongoing analytic psychotherapy, and many years of living, far more comfortable with the changes that are necessary. I can allow myself to be pulled and pushed in various ways without the fear I had earlier in life that I would be toppled over or destroyed.

For this reason, I now greatly resonate with Ogden saying in this book--and all the others I have read so far--that each course of therapy, indeed each session, has to be different with each unique patient, and that if patients could eavesdrop on other sessions they would well wonder "Is this really the same Dr Ogden/DeVille as the one I see and hear and talk to?" 

Third, Ogden took me back to reading a Jesuit psychotherapist to whom I was introduced in high-school in the 90s (who has since been revealed to have been an abuser), who used to quote St Irenaeus of Lyons famous line about the glory of God is a human being fully alive. For Ogden, several times in this book, he says quite compellingly: every form of psychopathology represents "a form of unconscious self-limitation of one's capacity to experience being alive as a human being" (p.18). 

Once more, of course, the debts here to Winnicott are obvious, including what his wife wrote of after his death: the "prayer" he sometimes used, asking "Oh God! May I be alive when I die." 

Fourth, sexualization is an attack on mentalization. Ogden does not use the latter term, Fonagy's work  (and that of others like Jon Allen) on it not being then widely known. But I have found this a helpful way to think of some issues in treatment which Andrea Celenza also addressed in her invaluable book Erotic Revelations: Clinical Applications and Perverse Scenarios, which I wrote about here. 

Fifth, alter the 'fundamental rule' to permit greater freedom for reverie and also patient privacy. The academic editor in me has long been at war with the psychoanalyst in me, finding that true and literal application of the rule makes for a chaotic session, almost quasi-psychotic at times, and strick application of the rule can be an attack on the capacity to dream and think. I know in my own therapy I once very deliberately, and with gleeful malice, went on a 'wild' spree of free associating to run out the clock in the last 15 minutes of a session to avoid talking about a very embarrassing dream. 

Sixth, quoting Freud's 1914 paper "On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement," Ogden reminds us that "any line of investigation which recognizes...these two facts [transference and resistance] and takes them as the starting-point of its work has a right to call itself psycho-analysis." This, blessedly, releases us from silly and interminable debates about use of a couch and number of sessions being somehow exclusively indicative of psychoanalytic treatment.  

Seventh, simply listen. This is from Freud's 1912 paper "Recommendations to Physicians Practicing Psycho-Analysis." By this Ogden says that Freud meant engage in that evenly hovering attention precisely to catch the drift of, to tune into, the unconscious mind of the patient. This puts me in mind of Coltart's exhortation to practice bare attention. 

Eighth, quoting Winnicott, psychotherapy takes place in the overlap of two areas of playing, that of the patient and that of the therapist.