ABSTRACT
The mind is inherently, constitutively, intersubjective. Starting from birth, one finds one’s mind only by “getting lost” in the other. When T. H. Ogden talks about losing oneself he is actually talking about finding oneself. For Ogden the analytic encounter is a dialectical game of reverie that helps develop the intersubjective analytic third. This unconscious common area is the premise for creating predominantly verbal symbols for “heretofore unspeakable and unthinkable aspects of the analysand’s internal object world”. In using the term dreaming in place of thinking or symbolising, Ogden preserves the richness of the Freudian concept of dream work. Undreamt dreams are like night terrors, and correspond to areas of the psychotic mind. Interrupted dreams are nightmares and correspond to non-psychotic areas of the personality. In the clinical vignette in Ogden’s article, the patient identifies with the character played by Nicolas Cage and his repeated failures.
