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Creative Readings: Essays on Seminal Analytic Works: Essays on Seminal Analytic Works

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Thomas H. Ogden is the winner of the 2004 International Journal of Psychoanalysis Award for the Most Important Paper of the year and the 2010 Haskell Norman Prize - an international award for "outstanding achievement as a psychoanalytic clinician, teacher and theoretician".

Thomas Ogden is internationally recognized as one of the most creative analytic thinkers writing today. In this book he brings his original analytic ideas to life by means of his own method of closely reading major analytic works. He reads watershed papers in a way that does not simply cast new and discerning light on the works he is discussing, but introduces his own thinking regarding the ideas being discussed in the texts.

Ogden offers expanded understandings of some of the most fundamental concepts constituting psychoanalytic theory and practice. He does so by finding in each of the articles he discusses much that the author knew, but did not know that he or she knew. An example of this is how Freud, in his conception of the unconscious workings of mourning and melancholia, was providing the foundation of a theory of unconscious internal object relations. Ogden goes on to provide further re-readings of classic material from the following key contributors to contemporary psychoanalysis:



W. R. D. Fairbairn

Donald Winnicott

Wilfred Bion

Hans Loewald

Harold Searles. This book is not simply a book of readings, it is a book about reading, about how to read in a way that readers actively rewrite what they are reading, and in so doing makes the ideas truly their own. The concepts that Ogden develops in his readings provide a significant step in the reader's expansion of his or her understanding of many of the ideas that lie at the cutting edge of contemporary psychoanalysis. It will be of particular interest to psychoanalysts and psychotherapists who use a psychodynamic approach, as well as professionals and academics with an interest in contemporary psychoanalysis.

216 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2012

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Thomas H. Ogden

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147 reviews
September 1, 2024
This is an amazing collection of papers that delivers a world to any analyst-therapist who’ll read it front to end. It expands you even when you think you know the papers, even when you feel you understand the ideas, Even when you’ve read this very book years ago. I kept feeling I’d found a favorite paper in the book but then the next one would win me over. These papers build and connect to each other, not only by dint of their place in order of appearance on the analytic stage but by the way Ogden presents each author’s need of the others ideas.
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