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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.

The author discusses differences between what he calls epistemological psychoanalysis (having to do with knowing and understanding), for which Freud and Klein are principal authors, and ontological...

THOMAS OGDEN: On reading Riccardo Lombardi’s Formless Infinity (2015), a thought occurred to me regarding the place of his work in the evolving psychoanalytic conception of the relationship between...

In this paper the author attempts to describe and illustrate how he talks with his patients. He avoids use of language that invites the patient to engage predominantly in conscious, secondary proce...

The author's focus in this paper is on the role that language plays in bringing to life the truth of the patient's lived experience in the analytic session. He discusses particular forms of discourse that enable the patient to experience with the analyst the truth that the patient had previously been unable to experience, much less put into words, on his own. The three forms of discourse that the author explores-direct discourse, tangential discourse, and discourse of non sequiturs-do not simply serve as ways of communicating the truth; they are integral aspects of the truth of what is happening at any given moment of a session. The truth that is experienced and expressed in the analytic discourse lies at least as much in the breaks (the disjunctions) in that discourse as in its manifest narrative.

Bion's "Notes on Memory and Desire" (1967a) is an impossible paper that this article's author has struggled with for decades. He views the paper, only two and a half pages in length, as a landmark contribution. Despite its title-and its infamous dictates to resist the impulse to remember past sessions and desire for "results"-the paper is not, most importantly, about memory and desire. It proposes a new analytic methodology that supplants awareness from its central role in the analytic process and, in its place, instates the analyst's (largely unconscious) work of intuiting the (unconscious) psychic reality of the present moment by becoming at one with it. This article's clinical examples, provided from the author's own work, illustrate something of his ways of talking with his patients.

This is a clinical paper in which the author describes analytic work in which he dreams the analytic session with three of his patients. He begins with a brief discussion of aspects of analytic theory that make up a good deal of the context for his clinical work. Central among these concepts are (1) the idea that the role of the analyst is to help the patient dream his previously "undreamt" and "interrupted" dreams; and (2) dreaming the analytic session involves engaging in the experience of dreaming the session with the patient and, at the same time, unconsciously (and at times consciously) understanding the dream. The author offers no "technique" for dreaming the analytic session. Each analyst must find his or her own way of dreaming each session with each patient. Dreaming the session is not something one works at; rather, one tries not to get in its way.

The ways in which Franz Kafka and Jorge Luis Borges struggled with the creation of consciousness in their lives and in their literary works are explored in this two-part essay. In Part I, the author juxtaposes a biographical sketch of Kafka with a close reading of his story "A Hunger Artist" (1924), in which a character (whose personality holds much in common with that of Kafka) spends his life in a quasi-delusional state starving himself in public performances. The hunger artist's self-awareness (of having lived a life devoid of the experience of love and mutual recognition) is achieved in the context of an interpersonal experience in which he has, in fact, found/created "the food [he] liked," that is, an experience of loving and being loved, of seeing and being seen, of being aware of and alive to his own imminent death. This fragile, paradoxical state of consciousness is sustained for only a moment before it is attacked, but not entirely destroyed.

The author views the analytic enterprise as centrally involving an effort on the part of the analyst to track the dialectical movement of individual subjectivity (of analyst and analysand) and intersubjectivity (the jointly created unconscious life of the analytic pair--the analytic third). In Part I of this paper, the author discusses clinical material in which he relies heavily on his reverie experiences to recognize and verbally symbolize what is occurring in the analytic relationship at an unconscious level. In Part II, the author conceives of projective identification as a form of the analytic third in which the individual subjectivities of analyst and analysand are subjugated to a co-created third subject of analysis. Successful analytic work involves a superseding of the subjugating third by means of mutual recognition of analyst and analysand as separate subjects and a reap-propriation of their (transformed) individual subjectivities.

The author discusses the notion of voice as a contribution to the development of a set of ideas and an attendant vocabulary adequate for describing the richness and complexity of language usage in the analytic setting. In a discussion of the sounds, movement, and texture of voice in poems by Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens, the author illustrates ways in which a listener attempts to experience how a speaker creates a voice and brings himself to life through his use of language. The layering of sounds and feelings in voice is discussed in terms of the creation of "oversounds" derived from the experience of analyst and analysand in the jointly constructed unconscious "analytic third."

The author believes that contemporary psychoanalysis has shifted its emphasis from the understanding of the symbolic meaning of dreams, play, and associations to the exploration of the processes of thinking, dreaming, and playing. In this paper, he discusses his understanding of three forms of thinking-magical thinking, dream thinking, and transformative thinking-and provides clinical illustrations in which each of these forms of thinking figures prominently. The author views magical thinking as a form of thinking that subverts genuine thinking and psychological growth by substituting invented psychic reality for disturbing external reality. By contrast, dream thinking--our most profound form of thinking-involves viewing an emotional experience from multiple perspectives simultaneously: for example, the perspectives of primary process and secondary process thinking. In transformative thinking, one creates a new way of ordering experience that allows one to generate types of feeling, forms of object relatedness, and qualities of aliveness that had previously been unimaginable.

A form of pathological internal object relationship is described that timelessly perpetuates the infant's subjective experience of the mother's difficulty in recognizing and responding to her infant's internal state. The individual identifies with both the mother and the infant in this internal object relationship and experiences intense anxiety and despair in relation to his efforts at knowing what he is feeling and therefore of knowing who he is. Substitute formations are utilized to create the illusion that the individual knows what he feels.