TY - GEN A1 - Gougoulis, Nicolas A1 - Driffield, Katryn A1 - Ogden, Thomas T1 - Interview with Thomas Ogden T2 - International Forum of Psychoanalysis, Vol. 30 (No. 4, 2021), pp. 223-233. N2 - In this interview Thomas Ogden freely speaks about himself and the evolution of his work, with particular regard for the analytic authors he values the most and their specific language. We also learn about his very meaningful relationships with both Bryce Boyer and James Grotstein, and about how much writing means to him. The interview was conducted in February 2020 during the COVID-19 lockdown per email correspondence, the aim of the authors being to make their French colleagues more familiar with Thomas Ogden's life and work. Y1 - 2021 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Ogden, Thomas H. T1 - A Comparison of Meltzoff, Trevarthen, and Stern JF - Psychoanalytic Dialogues Vol. 01 (1991), pp. 361-376. Y1 - 1991 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Ogden, Thomas H. T1 - A Contribution to the Supervisory Panel JF - Psychoanalytic Dialogues Vol. 01 (1991), pp. 377-390. N2 - The capacity for personal isolation is as critical to psychological health as is the capacity for object relatedness. In this paper, the notion of personal isolation is expanded to include a form of isolation in which the infant replaces the mother-as-environment with his own sensation matrix. This form of experience is not conceived of as a phase or stage of development prior to object relatedness rather, it is viewed as an ongoing facet of all human experience that serves as a buffer against the continual strain of being alive in the world of human beings. The understanding of this primitive dimension of personal isolation provides a way of thinking about the differences between the elaboration of universal >autistic-contiguous< forms of experience and the development of pathological autism. Y1 - 1991 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Ogden, Thomas H. T1 - Healing Haunted Hearts – Toward a Model for Integrating Subjectivity: Commentary on Papers by Philip Bromberg and Gerald Stechler JF - Psychoanalytic Dialogues Vol. 07 (1997), pp. 001-021. N2 - In this paper I comment on several aspects of the way language is used in psychoanalysis. Language is viewed not simply as a >package< for carrying ideas and feelings, but as a medium in which thoughts and feelings are created. In the analytic setting, analyst and analysand are viewed as engaged in an effort to use language in a way that is adequate to the task of creating/conveying a sense of what it feels like for the patient to be human, to the extent that he is capable at a given moment (with particular emphasis on describing the leading anxiety that the analysand is experiencing). The analyst strives to use language in a way that embodies the tension of forever struggling to generate meaning while at every step casting doubt on the meanings >arrived at< or >clarified.< Forms of lifelessness of analytic language are discussed with emphasis on those forms of linguistic deadness that derive from (1) the analyst's ideological attachment to a particular school of analytic thought and (2) the analyst's unconscious participation in an intersubjective construction jointly, but asymmetrically, generated by analyst and analysand (Ogden, 1994a, b, in press a, b). Finally, I discuss the idea of effects being created in language and suggest that this phenomenon constitutes a principal medium through which unconscious meaning is communicated in the analytic setting. Such unconscious effects in language are generated at least as much through the way the patient (or analyst) is speaking as through what the patient (or analyst) is saying. This paper does not represent an effort to apply analytic thinking to the field of literary studies. Instead, I hope to make a small contribution to an awareness of the life of words (and the life in words) that occurs in the analytic situation. Rather than attempting to look behind language, the effort here is to look into it. Y1 - 1997 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Ogden, Thomas H. T1 - Intersubjectivity and the Many Faces of Forgiveness: Commentary on Paper by Stephen Wangh JF - Psychoanalytic Dialogues Vol. 07 (1997), pp. 619-639. N2 - Joseph Brodsky (1995a) has referred to poetry as >a great disciplinarian< (p. 100) to prose. I would add that poetry is a great disciplinarian to analytic listening. In this paper I look at the way language is used in the making of poetry in three Frost poems. My interest is not so much in what a poem is >about,< but rather in what a poem is. I discuss the ways effects are created in language and how these effects, taken together, create the unique experience the reader generates (with the poet) in listening to the poem. I leave it entirely to the reader to make what connection he or she will between the experience of listening to poetry and the experience of listening to the language created in an analytic relationship. Y1 - 1997 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Ogden, Thomas H. T1 - Psychotic developments in a sexually abused borderline patient. Commentary on paper by Paul Williams JF - Psychoanalytic Dialogues Vol. 10 (2000), pp. 065-088. N2 - In this paper, I explore >the art of mourning< in the course of discussing two Borges prose poems, >Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote< (1941) and >Borges and I< (1957), both of which were written soon after Borges suffered enormous emotional losses. I suggest that successful mourning centrally involves a demand that we make on ourselves to create something – whether it be a memory, a dream, a story, a poem, a response to a poem – that begins to meet, to be equal to, the full complexity of our relationship to what has been lost and to the experience of loss itself. Paradoxically, in this process, we are enlivened by the experience of loss and death, even when what is given up or is taken from us is an aspect of ourselves. Y1 - 2000 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Ogden, Thomas H. T1 - Reply to commentaries JF - Psychoanalytic Dialogues Vol. 10 (2000), pp. 371-375. Y1 - 2000 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Ogden, Thomas H. T1 - Reply to reviews by Barratt, Blechner, and Schwartz of the intimate edge: Extending the reach of psychoanalytic interaction JF - Psychoanalytic Dialogues Vol. 11 (2001), pp. 293-311. N2 - In the course of the past decade, I have found himself looking as much to poets and the experience of reading poetry as to the work of other analysts in my ongoing effort to become a psychoanalyst. Both the poet and the psychoanalyst are individuals whose life's work is that of making >raid[s] [on] the inarticulate< (Eliot, 1940, p. 128) in their effort to delve as deeply as possible into what it is to be human and to render that experience in the medium of language. To this end, I offer a reading of Seamus Heaney's (1987) >Clearances,< an elegy Heaney wrote for his mother soon after her death. I explore the ways in which the experience of mourning – whether in a poem or in an analytic experience – is not simply >conveyed< (as if illuminating something already there) but created in the very act of writing/saying the poem or of bringing feelings to life in words in an analytic session. I begin by presenting a brief biographical account of Heaney not to >explain< his poetry in analytic terms but to allow the reader to create a more imaginative, more human reading of the poem as he or she enters into the conversation between the life of the man and the life of the poetry. Then I discuss the ways in which >Clearances< comes to life as a variety of coexisting forms of love that together shape an experience of grief. Y1 - 2001 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Ogden, Thomas H. T1 - The Return of the Dissociated: Discussion JF - Psychoanalytic Dialogues, Vol. 14 (2004), pp. 373-379. N2 - Can Love Last? The Fate of Romance Over Time by Stephen A. Mitchell (New York, NY: W.W. Norton, 2002, 224 pp.) This review of Stephen Mitchell's posthumously published book details the intelligence, vitality, and emotional depth that so many found in Mitchell as writer, teacher, colleague, analyst, friend, and family member. The review also notes the loss that Mitchell's death brought to the lives of individuals and to the life of the psychoanalytic movement. Y1 - 2004 ER -