The author situates the development of Ogden's clinical theory over the past 20 years within a philosophic scheme. Ogden (1986, 1989), in using Hegel to deconstruct the Cartesian objectivist assumptions of classical psychoanalysis, goes beyond Hegel to create in Subjects of Analysis (1994) a new synthesis that is similar to aspects of Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of intersubjectivity. This regrounding allows for the introduction of the analyst's prereflective and sensuous experience through reverie in the cocreation of an intersubjective >third.< The author illustrates how Ogden's solution to the problem of alterity transcends the debate over one-person versus two-person psychologies by producing a truly dialectical, postclassical psychoanalytic theory of intersubjectivity that is neither a one- nor a two-person psychology.
Freudian, Lacanian, and Kohutian approaches to the subject of seeing another and being seen by the other are reviewed and critiqued. The mirroring metaphor, so often invoked in psychoanalysis, is brought under scrutiny and concluded to be naive to the complexity of interaction actually occurring when one is seeing oneself being seen. Utilizing infant research findings and currents in Continental philosophy, a case is made for a reading of Winnicott's mirroring conception as a relational event: embodied and embedded in an intersubjective matrix of prereflective immediacy. Breaking with analytic rigidity emphasizing opacity and abnegation, Winnicott embraced the visual rather than inherently mistrusting it, advancing the dark analyses of vision beyond their pessimistic appraisals of the impossibility of an encounter with alterity.