The Matrix of the Mind: Object Relations and the Psychoanalytic Dialogue

Thomas H. Ogden

Jul 1993 · Jason Aronson

About this ebook

This book is exciting, original, and above all accessible–a rare combination for a text which deals in depth with psychoanalytical theory. Non-analysts are frequently both baffled and alienated by the jargon and the complexity of works which extend psychoanalytical thinking, but Ogden is revealed in this book as an outstanding communicator as well as a major theoretician. The book's subtitle is a guide to the main focus of the work, which reinterprets the work of Melanie Klein, with its focus on phantasy, in relation to the biological determinants of perception and the meaning and organization of experience in the interpersonal setting of human growth and development. Ogden re-interprets Klein to illuminate Freudian instinct theory, using the contributions of Bion, Fairbairn, and particularly Winnicott–British object relations theorists–to clarify and extend aspects of their work and to move towards an impressive exposition of the way in which the human mind develops."
–Pamela M. Ashurst, The British Journal of Psychiatry

A Jason Aronson Book

About the author

Thomas H. Ogden, M.D., is a graduate of Amherst College, the Yale School of Medicine, and the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute. He has served as an associate psychiatrist at the Tavistock Clinic, London, and is currently co-director of the Center for the Advanced Study of the Psychoses, a member of the faculty of the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute, and a supervising and personal analyst at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California. He teaches, supervises, and maintains a private practice of psychoanalysis in San Francisco.