Reclaiming Unlived Life

Experiences in Psychoanalysis

Thomas Ogden

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317353621
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychoanalysis
• Index: Psychology

In Reclaiming Unlived Life, influential psychoanalyst Thomas Ogden uses rich clinical examples to illustrate how different types of thinking may promote or impede analytic work. With a unique style of "creative reading, " the book builds upon the work of Winnicott and Bion, discussing the universality of unlived life and the ways unlived life may be reclaimed in the analytic experience. The book examines the role of intuition in analytic practice and the process of developing an analytic style that is uniquely one's own.

Ogden deals with many forms of interplay of truth and psychic change, the transformative effect of conscious and unconscious efforts to confront the truth of experience and how psychoanalysts can understand their own psychic evolution, as well as that of their patients. Reclaiming Unlived Life sets out a new way that analysts can understand and use notions of truth in their clinical work and in their reading of the work of Kafka and Borges.

Reclaiming Unlived Life: Experiences in Psychoanalysis will appeal to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists, as well as postgraduate students and anybody interested in the literature of psychoanalysis.

1Truth and Psychic Change

In place of an introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781315665948-1

Periodically, I try to find out who I have become, and am becoming, as a psychoanalyst by writing about that process as best I can (see Ogden, 1994, 1997a, 1997b, 2004, 2009). It is difficult to know where to start in this endeavor, but a point of departure that feels right to me now is that I must invent psychoanalysis freshly with each patient. In what follows, I address different aspects of the way I work as an analyst, while knowing at the outset that these parts cannot possibly come together as an integrated whole that accurately reflects my experience. But, by the act of laying them out here for myself and the reader, I hope they may be of use to the reader in gaining an understanding of how he or she practices psychoanalysis and may provide the beginnings of lines of thought with which the reader may make something of his or her own.

I find myself talking with each patient in a different way, with different tones of voice, different ranges of pitch, volume, and cadences of speech, different syntax and word choice, and in doing so communicate what cannot be said in any other way to any other person. This is not surprising to me in that I do not talk with one of my two grown children in the way I talk to the other; I did not talk with my father, at any stage of my life, as I did with my mother; I do not talk to my wife in a way that I do with anyone else. Each person with whom I enter into intimate conversation draws on me, and I draw on him or her, in such a way that I become a different person to some degree, and speak differently with each of these people. The more intimate the conversation, the more this is true. The conversations I have with my patients are among the most intimate that I have in my life.

I believe that each of my patients would be surprised to overhear the way I talk with any other patient. The way I talk with one patient would feel foreign to any other; what I say to one patient, and the way I say it, would sound too fraternal, too maternal, too formal, too something to another patient. To put it another way, one of my patients would, I believe, feel that the way I talk to any other patient does not suit her, and she would be right, because it was not meant for her, it was not created with her and for her.

The rhythm of the verbal exchange in my analytic work is also unique to each patient. The rhythm is not that of extended periods of silence while the patient talks, punctuated now and again by a comment on my part. Neither is it the rhythm of ordinary conversation outside the consulting room. The rhythm of the analytic conversation is unlike the rhythm of any other type of conversation. There are several interrelated reasons for this.

First, the setting in which the analytic conversation takes place is designed to provide the patient and analyst the opportunity for dreaming in such forms as waking dreaming (reverie), “talking-as-dreaming” (Ogden, 2007), “dream thinking,” and “transformative thinking” (see Chapter 2 for discussions of dream thinking and transformative thinking). In an effort to create a space for dreaming (other than in the initial consultation session or sessions), I sit behind the couch while the patient lies on the couch. I explain to each of my patients at the outset of an analysis that their use of the couch allows me the privacy I need to think in a way that differs from the way I think in face-to-face conversation. I add that the patient may find that this is true for him or her, too. I work with patients on the couch regardless of the frequency of our sessions.

Second, I do not adhere to Freud's (1912) “fundamental rule.” I have found both in my own experience and in the work of analysts who consult with me that the injunction to “say everything that comes to mind” compromises the patient's right to privacy, which is necessary for the freedom to dream in the session. So, rather than asking the patient to say everything that comes to mind, I tell the patient (sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly) that she is free to say whatever she wants to say and to keep to herself what she chooses—and that I will do the same (Ogden, 1996).

The upshot of these aspects of containment in the session (management of the analytic frame) is a rhythm of conversation that differs from any other conversation. It is a rhythm in which I am always present (always listening, sometimes talking) as the patient and I move in and out of various forms of dreaming. Waking up from dreaming in the analytic session is as important as the inherent therapeutic value of dreaming itself. Put another way, talking about dreaming—understanding something about the meaning of our dreaming—is, to my mind, an essential part of the therapeutic process.

The combination of these and other features of the analytic endeavor—including the fact that it is primarily designed to serve the function of helping the patient achieve psychological growth—contribute to the unique rhythms of the analytic conversation. That rhythm differs with each patient, and within each hour, but by and large involves an active interchange in which the patient speaks more than I do, yet neither of us “dominates” the conversation. I do not limit myself to brief statements. Now and again, I find myself talking at considerable length, at times telling the patient a story (sometimes a story the patient already knows, but pretends not to know so he or she can hear me tell it to them). As is the case with virtually everything else in the analytic relationship, the flow of conversation is a creation that only this patient and this analyst (the analyst I am becoming in the analysis) could bring to life in this particular way.

When I am not creating psychoanalysis with and for a given patient, the analysis feels generic and impersonal, both to the patient and to me. I am often bored during such sessions and may even fall asleep. Falling asleep under those circumstances is a signal to me that I am not able to dream the session with the patient, and may be unconsciously evading that work by attempting to “dream the session” on my own.

I conceive of my work as a psychoanalyst as that of dreaming with the patient aspects of his experience that have been too painful for him to dream on his own (Ogden, 2004). I use the term dreaming to refer to unconscious thinking, which I believe to be the richest form of thinking that human beings are capable of because it simultaneously brings to bear on an emotional problem a multiplicity of types of thinking—primary and secondary process thinking, synchronic and diachronic senses of time, cause-and-effect thinking, and thinking that releases the two from a sequential relationship (see Chapter 2 for further elaboration of this conception of “dreamthinking”).

It is impossible to say “where an idea comes from.” My principal psychoanalytic teachers have been Freud, Klein, Fairbairn, Winnicott, Bion, Loewald, and Searles, but I have learned as much about psychoanalysis from poets, novelists, and playwrights. From one perspective, every sentence that I write about “my” way of practicing psychoanalysis ought to have a string of references appended to it in order to give credit to the people who have contributed to the development of the ideas I am discussing. And yet, from another perspective, no references at all are called for because what I make with their work is uniquely my own.

In the course of my life, I have been fundamentally altered by my experiences with my parents and with the three analysts with whom I have worked. I am fortunate to be able to say that the ways I have been changed by these experiences have been predominantly enriching and growth promoting. Nonetheless, I have come to feel that I have a responsibility to become a better analyst than they were able to be for me. I feel the same responsibility holds true of the succession of generations of parents and their children. Fulfilling the responsibility to do better than they (both one's analyst and one's parents) is not an act of protest or revolt; it is an effort to make full use of them. I know that my parents wished that they could have been better parents to me, and I imagine my analysts felt something similar. This felt desire on the part of my parents was terribly important in my developing a need to imagine (“dream up”) a way of becoming a better parent to my children and a better analyst to my patients. When I am with my grandchildren, it is clear to me that my son is a better father than I was to him. This does not cause me to feel rejected or vanquished by him; quite the contrary, what greater gift could a child give a parent?

When I speak of a child or patient becoming a “better parent” or a “better analyst” than his or her parents or analyst, I have in mind (along with a great many other qualities) the child's (or analysand's) developing an enhanced capacity to carry the pain of the child or patient until the child or analysand has sufficiently matured to be able to carry it for himself or herself. In the succession of generations, of equal importance to the parent's or analyst's ability to carry the pain of the child or patient is their capacity, at each step of development, to return to the child or patient his own pain, because it is his (the child's or patient's) and is a vital part of his sense of self. This holds true even, or perhaps more accurately, particularly, for a person's traumatic experience. The individual is killed off to the degree that the experience of trauma is left “unlived.” The parent's and analyst's act of returning to the child or patient the responsibility for his pain is as difficult as carrying it, for to return it is to surrender a source of the parent's or analyst's sense of being needed, a feeling that is incomparably gratifying and self-affirming, and incredibly difficult to give up.

I find that psychoanalytic theory is not a thing apart from my experience with patients in the consulting room. While working with patients, analytic ideas are always in the wings. Even when analytic theory is out of my conscious thoughts, it nonetheless constitutes a “matrix” (a psychic context, a metaphorical womb) that sculpts the way I hold an experience while working with a patient. How could such fundamental ideas as the unconscious (in an analytic sense that few people other than analysts genuinely comprehend), dreaming (again, in the sense that only analysts understand), reverie, transference, infantile and childhood sexuality, and fear of breakdown not be part of the very structure of my mind and of my thinking at this point in my life? Theory becomes an encumbrance to me only when I find that I am using it in a way that answers, as opposed to frames or poses, questions.

The role of analytic theory varies greatly from patient to patient, and also from hour to hour, and minute to minute with any given patient. There are innumerable circumstances in which theory has played an important role in my analytic work. For reasons I cannot explain, an instance that comes to mind is one in which my thinking about analytic theory while with a patient served as a necessary way of distancing myself from what was happening in the session. I felt in the course of years of analytic work with Mr. A that I was living his psychotic terrors of disappearing into empty space, and that I was absolutely alone with them. This was something I could not bear indefinitely. I found myself puzzling in the sessions over matters of analytic theory, realizing only later that I was doing so in a way that felt like a conversation with (sane) people who were interested in, and knowledgeable about, analytic theories of primitive mental states. Engaging with theory (and imaginary theorists) in this way helped me tolerate what the patient was evoking in me long enough to see that period of work through.

I have now, many years after my work with Mr. A has come to an end, come to view this engagement with theory of primitive terror (and the theorists who have developed it) as a reverie experience in which I was discovering that it was not necessary to live the primitive terrors indefinitely on my own. I strongly believe that that realization, though I did not speak with Mr. A about it, was an essential communication to him that he, too, need not live indefinitely his terrors by himself. In this instance, analytic theory was not simply a set of ideas, it was a sane (meaning-generating and symbol-generating) language in which I could talk with myself during sessions, between sessions, and long after the sessions had occurred. (Of course, this is not a paradigm for the role of theory in clinical practice; rather, it is an example of a single experience.)

The idea that the human mind needs the truth as much as we need food and water (Bion, 1962a, p. 32), and that our minds—the unconscious aspect of our minds, in particular—are continuously in search of the truth, has become central to my current conception of the analytic process. Being in touch with (intuiting) the truth of what is occurring at any moment in an analytic session, to my mind, is closely connected with the phenomenon of aliveness of the session. When a session does not feel alive, it feels to me, and to the patient as well, that we are not engaged in an experience that feels truthful. It is not that we are “lying” or “resisting” (terms that feel moralistic, and consequently destructive to an effort to think); rather, we are fearful of the truth of what is occurring at that moment (Ogden, 1995).

The repercussions of the idea that the unconscious has not only a meaning-making function, but a truth-seeking function (Grotstein, 2007; see also Chapter 4), are multifold in my clinical work. As I write this, I am reminded of an experience that occurred in my work with Mr. C, a patient with cerebral palsy. My omnipotent wishes to “cure” him of his cerebral palsy served to protect me from facing a truth: I was unable to accept the patient as he was, just as his mother had been unable to manage the fact that her son was born with a serious handicap. She raged at him, calling him a monster. I did not rage at him, but I was unable to accept him for who he was. It took me a long time to see that in unconscious fantasy I experienced him as a defective version of the person he would have been (and worse yet, should have been), were he not a person impaired by cerebral palsy. The development of my capacity to live with the truth of his cerebral palsy was manifested, as the therapy progressed, in the form of my love (no other word suffices) for this patient just as he was.

Late in our work together, Mr. C told me a dream: “Not much happened in the dream. I was myself with my cerebral palsy, washing my car and enjoying listening to music on the car radio that I had turned up loud.” This was the first time that Mr. C specifically mentioned his cerebral palsy while telling me a dream. Moreover, the language he used to say it—“I was myself with my cerebral palsy”—was striking. How better could he have expressed a depth of recognition and acceptance of himself? In the dream, he was able to be a mother who took pleasure in bathing her baby (his car) while listening to and enjoying the music that was coming from inside the baby. This was not a dream of triumph; it was an ordinary dream of ordinary love: “nothing much happened.”

I was deeply moved by the patient's telling me his dream. I said to him, “What a wonderful dream that was.” In saying this, I was both living the experience of the dream with Mr. C, and speaking as a separate person observing the truth of who he was in the process of becoming (in the dream, in relation to me, and in the world outside of the consulting room).

Only after I had done the psychological work of accepting this patient as he was, could he, for the first time in his life, experience a form of being loved, and accepting himself for who he was, that felt real...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Truth and psychic change: In place of an introduction
• 2 On three forms of thinking: Magical thinking, dream thinking, and transformative thinking
• 3 Fear of breakdown and the unlived life
• 4 Intuiting the truth of what’s happening: On Bion’s “Notes on memory and desire”
• 5 On becoming a psychoanalyst
• 6 Dark ironies of the “gift”of consciousness: Kafka’s “A hunger artist”
• 7 A life of letters encompassing everything and nothing: Borges’s “Library of Babel”
• 8 A conversation with Thomas H. Ogden
• Index