Creative Readings: Essays on Seminal Analytic Works

Thomas H Ogden

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415698320
• eBook ISBN: 9781136449550
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Thomas H. Ogden is the winner of the 2004 International Journal of Psychoanalysis Award for the Most Important Paper of the year and the 2010 Haskell Norman Prize – an international award for "outstanding achievement as a psychoanalytic clinician, teacher and theoretician".

Thomas Ogden is internationally recognized as one of the most creative analytic thinkers writing today. In this book he brings his original analytic ideas to life by means of his own method of closely reading major analytic works. He reads watershed papers in a way that does not simply cast new and discerning light on the works he is discussing, but introduces his own thinking regarding the ideas being discussed in the texts.

Ogden offers expanded understandings of some of the most fundamental concepts constituting psychoanalytic theory and practice. He does so by finding in each of the articles he discusses much that the author knew, but did not know that he or she knew. An example of this is how Freud, in his conception of the unconscious workings of mourning and melancholia, was providing the foundation of a theory of unconscious internal object relations. Ogden goes on to provide further re-readings of classic material from the following key contributors to contemporary psychoanalysis:

• W. R. D. Fairbairn
• Donald Winnicott
• Wilfred Bion
• Hans Loewald
• Harold Searles.

This book is not simply a book of readings, it is a book about reading, about how to read in a way that readers actively rewrite what they are reading, and in so doing makes the ideas truly their own. The concepts that Ogden develops in his readings provide a significant step in the reader's expansion of his or her understanding of many of the ideas that lie at the cutting edge of contemporary psychoanalysis. It will be of particular interest to psychoanalysts and psychotherapists who use a psychodynamic approach, as well as professionals and academics with an interest in contemporary psychoanalysis.

1 Some thoughts on how to read this book

DOI: 10.4324/9780203125298-1

This volume is the product of more than a decade of writing my experience of reading major works by Freud, Fairbairn, Isaacs, Winnicott, Loewald, Bion, and Searles. I attempt not to write about my experience of reading their works, but to write my experience of reading them: to write what I have let these papers and books do to me, what I have done with these papers and books, and how I have rewritten them and made them my own books and papers. I try to capture in my writing something of the way I read in order that the reader may learn something about the way he reads, including the way he reads his own writing. This volume is “a reading book” – a book about reading, about how to read – not simply a book of readings.

The experience of reading

When I am talking about a book that is important to me, I often slip and say, “the book I wrote,” instead of, “the book I read,” and then correct myself. I’ve heard others regularly make the same slip. I attribute the error to the fact that when we have spent a good deal of time with a book, we feel that we have written it or at least rewritten it – and, in an important sense, we have. Reading is an experience in which we do not simply “take in” the meaning of the text. In the act of reading, we transform the black markings on the page into linguistic structures that hold significance. But when we are reading creatively, we do something more than that. We each produce our own personal set of meanings and ideas using the text as a starting point: “Take the book into your two hands, and read your eyes out; you will never find what I find” (Emerson, 1841, p. 87). I think of this way of reading – more accurately, this aspect of reading – as “transitive reading,” a reading experience in which we are actively doing something to the text, making it our own, interpreting in a way that adds something to the text that had not been there before we have read it.

It is also important to be able to read “intransitively” – that is, to be able to give oneself over to the experience of reading. When reading, I try to allow myself to be occupied and, to a certain extent, taken over by the mind of another person, the writer, as I speak his or her words. When I read an analytic text, for instance a work of Melanie Klein, I “become a Kleinian” and view the world through her eyes. In teaching Klein’s work, I ask students and colleagues to try on for size her ideas in their entirety as they read her work, and to do their best not to disrupt this experience of reading with such (knee jerk) objections as, “It is impossible for a two-day-old infant to fantasize in the way she is describing.”

Giving oneself over to the experience of reading is by no means a detached or passive event. One is not only allowing “foreigners” (words and sentences that are not one’s own) into oneself, one is also permitting oneself to be read by that foreigner (the writing). Of course, the writing cannot read us, but it can present us with a perspective on ourselves from which we have never viewed ourselves, and may never again be able not to include in the ways we view ourselves. The experience of “being read by the writing” (making use of the writing to engage in a form of self-reflection that is unique to the experience of reading) need not feel invasive or intrusive. On the contrary, in being read well by what one is reading (in using the experience of reading to read oneself), the reader may feel that he is becoming alive to a way of being that he has always felt to comprise an essential aspect of himself or herself, but has not known how to put into words, or how to more fully become the person who thinks and expresses himself in that way.

Winnicott’s writing is remarkable in its power to read the reader (see Chapter 5). Take, for example, a sentence from “Primitive emotional development”:

It seems to me that there is in it [the baby’s injuring his fingers or mouth by too vigorously sucking his thumb or hand] the element that something must suffer if the infant is to have pleasure: the object of primitive love suffers by being loved, apart from being hated.

(Winnicott, 1945, p. 155)

In reading this sentence, there is sadness and beauty to the language, particularly in the words “the object of primitive love suffers by being loved.” I have experienced the forcefulness, and even violence, of my children’s primitive love and their primitive need for me when they were infants – and even now that they are well into adulthood. I, like most parents, have experienced sleep deprivation, agonizing worry and emotional fraying as a consequence of trying to meet their primitive love with love of my own. But, as Winnicott is saying in this sentence (in an accepting, but unsentimental voice), that is the nature of the beast – the nature of being the object of primitive love.

Winnicott uses the word object in this sentence not in its usual technical sense (i.e. as a synonym for a person in the external object world or a figure in the internal object world), but in its everyday sense (the object of the transitive verb love: the person on whom, toward whom, against whom primitive love is directed). I, like most parents, would not trade a moment of being the object of that kind of love. More difficult for me to fully and genuinely acknowledge in reading and being read by Winnicott are the ways in which my own primitive love, both as a child and as an adult, has caused others – particularly my parents, my wife, and my children – to suffer. And that, too, is inescapably the nature of the beast.

Reading as interpreting: Adding something new

With the exception of Isaacs, all of the analysts whose work I discuss were prolific writers. I have chosen to look closely at one or two pieces of the writing of each author. I have selected these particular articles and books because my experience of reading and rereading them, and of metaphorically writing and rewriting them, has played a singularly important role in my development as a psychoanalyst. I try to stay true to each of the texts in the sense of accurately conveying (in part by citing the texts at some length) the author’s ideas and the way he or she expresses them. My emphasis, however, is not on trying to determine what Freud or Bion or Isaacs or Loewald “really meant.” I am far more interested in what these authors knew, but did not know they knew – in how these texts are rich in ways their authors did not consciously intend or understand.

My reading (and writing) in this way will inevitably lead the reader to ask where the author’s thinking leaves off and where mine begins. For example, when I say in Chapter 3 that it is “implicit” in Isaacs’ (1952) “The nature and function of phantasy” that inherent to phantasy is the need to discover, to get to know and understand external reality, I mean that, for me, the language Isaacs uses strongly suggests that idea. Did she have that in mind (consciously) when she wrote the paper? Probably not, but I believe that the language she uses suggests that her thinking was leading in that direction. I support that idea by looking at her use of language in the final portion of her paper where she states that the symbolic function of phantasy “builds a bridge from the inner world to interest in the outer world and knowledge of physical objects and events” (Isaacs, 1952, p. 110). She goes on to say that phantasying promotes “the development of interest in the external world and the process of learning about it” (p. 110). And a bit later: “The power to seek out and organize knowledge [of the external world] is drawn [from phantasy activity]” (p. 110). It is from these statements and others that I cite in my discussion of her paper that I make my inferences about the way in which the need to know gives direction to phantasy activity (which I view as synonymous with unconscious thinking).

One might ask how you, the reader, are to decide to whom to give credit or responsibility for the inferences I draw/create. A part of my response to that question is: Who cares? The important thing is what one is able to do with the ideas that Isaacs makes explicit in combination with the ideas that her language suggests. In my reading of Isaacs I may be able to do more with aspects of the text than Isaacs was able to because I – as is the case for every contemporary analytic reader – have available to me perspectives derived from developments in psychoanalysis and related fields that Isaacs did not. To my ear, her text echoes work published decades after she wrote her paper, for example, Chomsky’s (1957, 1968) work on the deep structure of language, Bion’s (1962a, 1962b) work on a psychoanalytic theory of thinking, and Winnicott’s (1974) conception of “the fear of breakdown.” In addition, and probably more important, I have a mind of my own that is different from Isaacs’ mind, and that allows me to see in her work a good deal that she did not see. The same is true for you, the reader, in reading Isaacs and in reading what I write.

In the chapters that follow, I, at times, indicate that a particular idea is my own “extension” of an author’s work, but in truth, I cannot say exactly where the author’s thinking stops and mine begins. Ideas do not come with tags naming their owner. ¹ For example, in my discussion of Fairbairn’s work (Chapter 4, p. 62), I say

1 Just as ideas come without tags indicating who owns them, it is important that thinkers not come with tags indicating who owns them (for example, the tags “contemporary Kleinian,” “contemporary Freudian,” “self-psychologist,” “relational analyst,” and so on).

It seems to me that a libidinal tie to an internal object toward whom one feels anger, resentment, and the like, necessarily involves an (unconscious) wish/need to use what control one feels one has to change the unloving and unaccepting (internal) object into a loving and accepting one.

From this vantage point, I view the libidinal ego and the internal saboteur as aspects of self that are intent on transforming the exciting object and the rejecting object into loving objects.

In this passage, I am extending Fairbairn’s thinking about internal object relations by stating that within the terms of the internal object world that Fairbairn describes, it seems to me that the most important motivating force driving the creation and maintenance of the unconscious internal object world is the need to transform unsatisfactory objects into satisfactory ones. Fairbairn, himself, never comes to this conclusion. You, the reader, will have to judge for yourself whether my extensions of Fairbairn’s ideas are, indeed, consistent with Fairbairn’s thinking, and whether they enrich or detract from his contribution. But I realize as I listen to my own words – “You, the reader, will have to judge for yourself whether my extensions of Fairbairn are, indeed, consistent with Fairbairn’s thinking” – that this idea constitutes for me only a partial truth. To that perspective must be added another equally valid point of view: you, the reader, should feel no obligation to try to determine what is my thinking and what is Fairbairn’s. In fact, the effort to do so is beside the point. What is important is what you do with Fairbairn’s writing and with mine – what you make that is neither his nor mine, but your own.

Even if one were inclined to try to determine what is Fairbairn’s and what is mine, the task, it seems to me, is impossible. Breuer, in his introduction to the theoretical section of Studies on Hysteria (Breuer and Freud, 1893–1895), eloquently comments on the problems involved in claims of originality:

When a science is making rapid advances, thoughts which were first expressed by single individuals quickly become common property… It is scarcely possible to be certain who first gave them utterance, and there is always a danger of regarding as a product of one’s own what has already been said by someone else. I hope, therefore, that I may be excused … if no strict distinction is made between what is my own and what originates elsewhere.

(Breuer and Freud, 1893–1895, pp. 185–186)

Borges, in the preface to his first volume of poetry, Fervor to Buenos Aires, adds irony and wit, and an additional layer of complexity, to the idea that no one has the right to claim a poem (or an idea) as his own:

If in the following pages there is some successful verse or other, may the reader forgive me the audacity of having written it before him. We are all one; our inconsequential minds are much alike, and circumstances so influence us that it is something of an accident that you are the reader and I the writer – the unsure, ardent writer – of my verses.

(Borges, 1923, p. 269)

The irony here is that Borges, in a style of writing and thinking that is unmistakably original to him, is dismissing the idea that anyone is justified in claiming that his writing and thinking are strictly his own. The idea that the author cannot claim originality for his writing is not original to Borges, but Borges’ way of expressing that idea – and at the same time refuting it – radically alters it, and makes it original to him.

What one says and the way one says it

Whether or not we believe that anyone has the right to attach his or her name to an idea or a poem or an essay or a particular form of “word music” (Borges, quoted by Vargas Llosa, 2008, p. 32), human truths must again and again be rediscovered in new forms, otherwise those truths become clichés that staunch the flow of genuine thinking and creativity. Renewal of thinking and originality of expression are mutually dependent: writing is a unique form of thinking; and originality of writing is originality of thinking. Neither content nor style exists without the other. Nevertheless, if, for a moment, we think of content as the anatomy of writing, then style is its physiology. Content, in the absence of style, is a lifeless corpse; style, without content, is an insubstantial wraith. Together, style and content comprise t...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Some thoughts on how to read this book
• 2 Freud’s “Mourning and melancholia” and the origins of object relations theory
• 3 Reading Susan Isaacs: Toward a radically revised theory of thinking
• 4 Why read Fairbairn?
• 5 Winnicott’s “Primitive emotional development”
• 6 Reading Bion
• 7 Elements of analytic style: Bion’s clinical seminars
• 8 Reading Loewald: Oedipus reconceived
• 9 Harold Searles’ “Oedipal love in the countertransference” and “Unconscious identification”
• References
• Index