What Alive Means: Psychoanalytic Explorations

by Thomas H. Ogden

Internationally acclaimed for the clarity of his writing and thinking, Ogden radically reconceives psychoanalysis as a therapeutic process in which the patient is helped not only to achieve self‑understanding, but to become more fully oneself.

The individual comes to experience life in a way that feels more real, more alive, more personal, more imaginative, and more one’s own. Ogden is concerned with helping the patient reclaim lost life, life that one was not able to experience when it occurred because it was too painful, too confusing, and too dangerous. Ogden pushes the envelope of psychoanalysis as he presents ways in which he rethinks the concepts of the unconscious and analytic time.

He expands on what it means to be oneself in an authentic way and how clinical process can help achieve that goal. Building on Ogden’s own highly influential work on the nature of psychoanalysis, this book is essential reading for all psychoanalysts and other readers interested in expanding their understanding of contemporary analytic thinking and clinical practice.

Genres: Psychology, Psychoanalysis

134 pages, Kindle Edition

Published December 30, 2024

Reviews

[Dovilė Stonė · Rating 5 out of 5]

“The patient experiences unlived life not in the form of unconscious conflict, repressed urges or fantasies, but as a sense of emptiness and futility, a sense of not being present in one’s own life.” (Ogden, 2024, p. 1)

From the perspective of synchronic time, the childhood traumatic event itself is gone but is alive in the present as a consequence of the impression it has left on the patient’s present, evolving state of being who he or she is. The impression is alive in the very fiber of the being of the individual in the present moment; the impression is alive in what makes the individual who he or she is. The childhood trauma is alive in the impression left by the past on the patient. The trauma, as experienced in the analytic process, is not a memory of the past, but it is alive in the patient’s very being and is experienced more fully in the co‐created subjectivity of patient and analyst (“the analytic third,” Ogden, 1994a, b).
From the perspective of synchronic time, the term regression is misleading in that it suggests that the patient returns to an earlier time, which is impossible because the past no longer exists, there is no past to return to. What occurs in analysis is the patient’s coming into being in such a way that the impressions left on him or her by the past are lived with the analyst in the present. One is not “going back,” but one is living in the analytic relationship the impression the past has left on the patient’s way of being himself or herself.” (Ogden, 2024, p. 49)

“So too, the concept of the transference takes on different meaning when it is not viewed as the patient’s projection of an internal object relationship onto the analytic relationship, and instead seen as the patient’s living the present moment of the past from the perspective of the subjectivity co‐created by patient and analyst.” (Ogden, 2024, p. 50)

“An individual cannot grow up in a healthy way without another person whose responses help her see who she is. In the absence of the response of the mother and others, the infant experiences herself as no one, or as an imitation of a person, or the person her mother needs her to be, or some other substitute for the experience of being seen as uniquely herself.” (Ogden, 2024, p. 56)