ABSTRACT

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.

chapter 1|16 pages

Truth and Psychic Change

In place of an introduction

chapter 2|29 pages

On Three Forms of Thinking

Magical thinking, dream thinking, and transformative thinking

chapter 3|23 pages

Fear of Breakdown and the Unlived Life

chapter 4|21 pages

Intuiting the Truth of what's Happening

On Bion's “Notes on memory and desire”

chapter 5|21 pages

On Becoming a Psychoanalyst 1

chapter 6|23 pages

Dark Ironies of the “Gift” of Consciousness

Kafka's “A hunger artist”

chapter 7|26 pages

A Life of Letters Encompassing Everything and Nothing

Borges's “Library of Babel”

chapter 8|18 pages

A Conversation with Thomas H. Ogden 1