Thomas H. Ogden’s research while affiliated with Michigan Psychoanalytic Institute and other places

Die Autor*innen arbeiten in Band 19 der Internationalen Psychoanalyse einen Schwerpunkt auf das Sein und die Bedingungen des Lebendig-Werdens heraus und bringen eine Vielfalt an Themen zusammen, die unter einem ontologischen Gesichtspunkt neu gedacht werden können. In Arbeiten zu Winnicotts Konzeption des Leibseelischen und der Bedeutung von »Unintegriertheit« ebenso wie in Berichten von klinischer Arbeit mit autistischen Patient*innen und mit einem psychotischen Adoleszenten während der Covid-19-Pandemie wird diese früheste leibseelische Ebene des going on being deutlich. Weitere Arbeiten befassen sich mit der Entstehung eines Kern-Selbst aus dem primären Masochismus, mit weiblicher Subjektivität und mit dem Thema des »verlorenen« Selbstanteils bei trans Patient*innen. Auch bei dem Blick auf gesellschaftliche Themen wie Rassismus, Traumatisierung durch ein autoritäres Regime oder die psychoanalytische Identität zwischen den Kulturen geht es weniger um das Erkennen und Deuten als darum, durch genaue Beschreibungen die Wahrnehmungsfähigkeiten für die Dimension des Seins und Werdens zu erweitern. Das International Journal of Psychoanalysis gilt als weltweit wichtigste Fachzeitschrift der Psychoanalyse. Aus diesem reichen Fundus versammelt Internationale Psychoanalyse jährlich ausgewählte Beiträge in deutscher Übersetzung. Mit Beiträgen von Lisa Baraitser, Dominique Bourdin, Eugênio Canesin Dal Molin, Nelson Ernesto Coelho Junior, Louise Gyler, Alessandra Lemma, Anat Tzur Mahalel, Sharon Numa, Thomas H. Ogden, Michael Parsons, Tami Pollak, Luca Quagelli, Joona Taipale und Renata Udler Cromberg

The author proposes ways of rethinking the concepts of the unconscious and time in the analytic setting, including the very existence of the unconscious. Freud (1915) stated that the success psychoanalytic thinking has in making inferences about the patient's unconscious makes the existence of the unconscious "incontrovertible." The author submits that this success does not establish the existence of the unconscious; rather, the inferences we think we make about the unconscious are inferences about consciousness itself - the totality of our experiences of thinking, feeling, sensing, observing, and communicating with ourselves. The author then offers thoughts about a second analytic concept, the experience of time in the analytic setting. He conceives of there being two inseparable sorts of experiences of analytic time that stand in a dynamic relationship with one another: diachronic time (clock time) and synchronic time (dream time). In diachronic time, time is sequential; one thing leads to another. In synchronic time, all time is contained in the present. In analysis, childhood trauma is experienced for the first time (in synchronic time) in the co-created subjectivity of patient and analyst.

In this essay the author describes some of the transformations that occur as one moves from preverbal functioning to verbally symbolic language. In preverbal experience, there is a direct connection between the sign and what is signified. An infant or child signifies displeasure by throwing his food or other objects to the floor. Much of the emotional tie between mother and infant and patient and analyst is communicated in this way. When a transformation occurs from preverbal to verbally symbolic language, as occurs in early development and as one interprets a dream, meaning is not merely translated, meaning is created. On acquiring verbally symbolic language, a “space” mediated by an interpreting subject opens between the symbol (for instance, the word guilt) and the symbolized (the experience of guilt) and a new subjectivity is created. On entry into verbally symbolic language, one becomes able to experience oneself in a qualitatively different way; one becomes both subject and object, I and me; one becomes able to experience a far broader range of feelings and types of thinking. Helen Keller’s account of her experience of acquiring verbally symbolic language is drawn upon.

In “Mind and its relation to the psyche-soma,” Winnicott reinvents the concept of psyche-soma by viewing it as a set of experiences located neither in the body nor in the brain, and in fact, not located anywhere. Psyche, in health, is understood to be the imaginative functioning of mental processes, and soma is understood to be the experience of physical realness and aliveness. Winnicott offers a clinical illustration of work with a patient who feels unreal to herself. He describes a juncture in the analysis in which the patient's somatic functioning is everything, while Winnicott, by feeling his own breathing and watching the patient breathe, knows that she is alive. This is the beginning of her becoming able to experience her breathing (soma) and imagining (psyche) as real, alive, and her own. Among the concepts Winnicott alludes to, and that I develop, are (1) the idea that in his clinical work Winnicott not only lives an experience with the patient, he also brings an unspoken structure of meaning to the experience, and the two are inseparable; and (2) the idea that Winnicott introduces a set of terms and a way of thinking that is independent of the differentiation of conscious and unconscious mind (Freud's topographic model). These ideas include aliveness and deadness, realness and unrealness, being and disruption of being.

In his reading of Winnicott's "Transitional objects and transitional phenomena," the author views Winnicott as engaged in offering a way of conceiving of the fundamentally human task of creating states of being in which the individual's ideas, feelings, and bodily sensations come to feel alive and real to him or her. The author proposes that the concept of paradox captures something of both the idea and the experience of transitional objects and phenomena. The author then looks closely at the new clinical illustration that Winnicott presents in the fourth and final version of his paper. He discusses what he views as Winnicott's most evolved form of clinical practice. The author also takes up Winnicott's idea of "the negative," a state of being in which the gap, the amnesia, the death is all that feels real, while the presence or memory of the object feels unreal. The author offers an illustration of clinical work in which a significant alteration of the analytic frame provides a context in which the patient is able to begin to experience feelings that feel real and alive to him.

In this brief essay I am concerned not with finding the meaning of poems by Robert Frost and Emily Dickinson; rather, I am engaged in describing the experience of reading these poems, the effects created by them, and the way language is used to create these effects.

The author tells the stories of the inception of mind that is developed in the work of five analytic theorists whom he sees as central to the evolution of a new and fertile form of psychoanalytic thinking and practice: Freud, Klein, Fairbairn, Winnicott, and Bion. The conception of mind presented by each of these authors moves from that of an apparatus for thinking (in the work of Freud, Klein, and Fairbairn) to that of a process located in the very act of experiencing (in the work of Winnicott and Bion). The work of each of the theorists constitutes a radical transformation of thinking relative to those who have preceded and those who follow him or her. The author, in telling the “stories” of the emergence of mind and the concept of mind according to each of these theorists, offers not only his own narrative structure and clarifications of their work, but also his own interpretations and extensions of their ideas.