Reclaiming Unlived Life: Experiences in Psychoanalysis

Thomas Ogden

Jun 2016 · Routledge

About this ebook

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.

About the author

Thomas H. Ogden, MD has published eleven books of essays on the theory and practice of psychoanalysis, most recently Creative Readings: Essays on Seminal Analytic Works; Rediscovering Psychoanalysis; and This Art of Psychoanalysis. His work has been translated into more than twenty languages. He was awarded the 2012 Sigourney Award for his contributions to the field of psychoanalysis.