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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 c...

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 “Communicating and Not Communicating Leading to a Study of Certain Opposites,” Winnicott introduces the radical idea that communicating with subjective objects is “cul-de-sac” communication (communication not meant for any external or internal object), but which nonetheless endows every aspect of one’s experience with “all the sense of real.” He conceives of the “main point” of his paper to be the idea that “each individual is an isolate, permanently non-communicating, permanently unknown, in fact unfound.” I suggest that the “main point” is more inclusive and might be stated as: each individual needs equally to be found (recognized, but not exposed) and to be unfound (an incommunicado isolate). Winnicott warns that when an analysis has reached the depths of the patient’s personality, interpreting destructively introduces what is “not-me” too close to the core self, so “the analyst had better wait.” An unstated question arises: what does the analyst do while he waits other than remaining silent...

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...

'The Use of an Object and Relating through Identifications' is a landmark contribution that I find very difficult to write about because so much of what lies at its core is merely suggested. It is necessary for the reader not only to read the paper, but also to write it. In my reading/writing of the paper, the mother becomes real for the infant in the process of his actually destroying her as an external object (destroying her sense of herself as an adequate mother), and his perceiving that destruction. She also becomes a real external object for the infant in the process of his experiencing the psychological work involved in surviving destruction, a form of work that does not occur in the world of fantasied objects. The analyst or mother may not be able to survive destruction. It is essential that the analyst be able to acknowledge to himself his inability to survive and, if necessary, to end the analysis because of the very damaging effects for both patient and analyst of prolonged experience of this sort. The author presents clinical discussions of analyses in which the analyst survives destruction and is unable to survive destruction.

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.

In this paper, I have proposed that Winnicott's concept of potential space might be understood as a state of mind based upon a series of dialectical relationships between fantasy and reality, me and not-me, symbol and symbolized, etc., each pole of the dialectic creating, informing, and negating the other. The achievement of such a dialectical process occurs by means of a developmental advance from the 'invisible oneness' of the mother-infant unit to the subjective 'three-ness' of the mother-and-infant (as symbolic objects) and the infant (as interpreting subject). Failure to create or maintain the dialectical process leads to specific forms of psychopathology that include the experience of the fantasy object as a thing in itself, the defensive use of reality that forecloses imagination, the relationship to a fetish object, and the state of 'non-experience'. The 'processing' of a projective identification is understood as the re-establishment of the recipient's capacity to maintain a dialectical process (e.g. of me and not-me) that had been limited in the course of the recipient's unconscious participation in the projector's externalized unconscious fantasy.

In this paper, two clinical sequences are presented in an effort to describe the methods by which the analyst attempts to recognise, understand and verbally symbolize for himself and the analysand the specific nature of the moment-to-moment interplay of the analyst's subjective experience, the subjective experience of the analysand and the intersubjectively-generated experience of the analytic pair (the experience of the analytic third). The first clinical discussion describes how the intersubjective experience created by the analytic pair becomes accessible to the analyst in part through the analyst's experience of 'his own' reveries, forms of mental activity that often appear to be nothing more than narcissistic self-absorption, distractedness, compulsive rumination, daydreaming and the like. A second clinical account focuses on an instance in which the analyst's somatic delusion, in conjunction with the analysand's sensory experiences and body-related fantasies, served as a principal medium through which the analyst experienced and came to understand the meaning of the leading anxieties that were being (intersubjectively) generated.

Projective identification is not a metapsychological concept. The phenomena it describes exist in the realm of thoughts, feelings, and behaviour, not in the realm of abstract beliefs about the workings of the mind. Projective identification is a concept that addresses the way in which feeling-states corresponding to the unconscious fantasies of one person are engendered in and processed by another person. Projective identification provides a clinical-level theory that may be of value to therapists in their efforts to organize and render meaningful the relationship between their own experience and the transference. The concept of projective identification integrates statements about unconscious fantasy, interpersonal pressure, and the response of a separate personality system to a set of engendered feelings. The countertransference feelings represent only a few of the more common unconscious fantasies evoked in the therapist while he is serving as the recipient of a projective identification.

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.

Leonard Frist kept his important things in the top drawer of his dresser, and although his son, Harold, had never been told not to open it, he never did open it until that September morning in 1999...

In this commentary I discuss ways in which Rachael Peltz makes use of a work of art—John Berger's The Shape of a Pocket—to glimpse “the absent,” Berger's word for the inarticulate living core of human experience. I first take up the idea that art must overcome the existent as “an act of resistance instigating hope” (Berger, 2001, p. 22). Each of the mediums in which art (including the art of psychoanalysis) is made involves the artist's effort to overcome the resistance inherent in transforming one form of experience (e.g., an analyst's reverie experience) into another (e.g., an intervention or an analytic essay). Peltz describes the state of mind necessary for such transformational movement as “an attitude of receptivity to whatever is about to happen,” but never completely comes into being. A second strand of thought that I discuss is the idea that disappearance is as important a part of the human condition as is appearance. Dreams, for example, would lose their mystery and power if they were not just o...

The author views Isaacs's (1952) paper, The nature and function of phantasy, as making an important contribution to the development of a radically revised psychoanalytic theory of thinking. Perhaps Isaacs's most important contribution is the notion that phantasy is the process that creates meaning, and that phantasy is the form in which all meanings - including feelings, defense 'mechanisms,' impulses, bodily experiences, and so on - exist in unconscious mental life. The author discusses both explicit formulations offered by Isaacs as well as his own extensions of her ideas. The latter include (1) the idea that phantasying generates not only unconscious psychic content, but also constitutes the entirety of unconscious thinking; (2) the notion that transference is a form of phantasying that serves as a way of thinking for the first time (in relation to the analyst) emotional events that occurred in the past, but were too disturbing to be experienced at the time they occurred and (3) a principal aim and function of phantasy is that of fulfilling the human need to get to know and understand the truth of one's experience. The author concludes by discussing the relationship between Isaacs's concept of phantasy and Bion's concepts of alpha function and the human need for the truth, as well as the differences between Fairbairn's and Isaacs's conceptions of the nature of unconscious internal object relationships.

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 development of British object-relations theory over the past twenty years can be viewed as containing the beginnings of an exploration of a realm of experience that lies outside of the states of being addressed by Klein, Winnicott, Fairbairn and Bion. In this paper, the idea of an autistic-contiguous position is proposed as a way of conceptualizing a psychological organization more primitive than either the paranoid-schizoid or the depressive position. This mode of organizing experience stands in a dialectical relationship to the paranoid-schizoid and depressive modes: each creates, preserves and negates the others. The autistic-contiguous mode is a sensory-dominated, pre-symbolic mode of generating experience which provides a good measure of the boundedness of human experience and the beginnings of a sense of the place where one's experience occurs. Anxiety in this mode consists of an unspeakable terror of the dissolution of boundedness resulting in feelings of leaking, falling or dissolving into endless, shapeless space. Principal forms of defence, ways of organizing and defining experience, types of relatedness to objects, and avenues to psychological change in the autistic-contiguous position are discussed and clinically illustrated.

In this paper, the author explores the phenomenon of not being able to dream (as opposed to not being able to remember one's dreams) from three different vantage points. First, from the point of vi...

The author presents a reading of Freud's "Mourning and melancholia" in which he examines not only the ideas Freud was introducing, but, as important, the way he was thinking/writing in this watershed paper. The author demonstrates how Freud made use of his exploration of the unconscious work of mourning and of melancholia to propose and explore some of the major tenets of a revised model of the mind (which later would be termed "object-relations theory"). The principal tenets of the revised model presented in this 1917 paper include: (1) the idea that the unconscious is organised to a significant degree around stable internal object relations between paired split-off parts of the ego; (2) the notion that psychic pain may be defended against by means of the replacement of an external object relationship by an unconscious, fantasied internal object relationship; (3) the idea that pathological bonds of love mixed with hate are among the strongest ties that bind internal objects to one another in a state of mutual captivity; (4) the notion that the psychopathology of internal object relations often involves the use of omnipotent thinking to a degree that cuts off the dialogue between the unconscious internal object world and the world of actual experience with real external objects; and (5) the idea that ambivalence in relations between unconscious internal objects involves not only the conflict of love and hate, but also the conflict between the wish to continue to be alive in one's object relationships and the wish to be at one with one's dead internal objects.

In the course of the past decade, I have found himself looking as much to poets and the experience of reading poetry as to the work of other analysts in my ongoing effort to become a psychoanalyst. Both the poet and the psychoanalyst are individuals whose life's work is that of making “raid[s] [on] the inarticulate” (Eliot, 1940, p. 128) in their effort to delve as deeply as possible into what it is to be human and to render that experience in the medium of language. To this end, I offer a reading of Seamus Heaney's (1987) “Clearances,” an elegy Heaney wrote for his mother soon after her death. I explore the ways in which the experience of mourning—whether in a poem or in an analytic experience—is not simply “conveyed” (as if illuminating something already there) but created in the very act of writing/saying the poem or of bringing feelings to life in words in an analytic session. I begin by presenting a brief biographical account of Heaney not to “explain” his poetry in analytic terms but to allow the re...

In this paper, I explore “the art of mourning” in the course of discussing two Borges prose poems, “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” (1941) and “Borges and I” (1957), both of which were written soon after Borges suffered enormous emotional losses. I suggest that successful mourning centrally involves a demand that we make on ourselves to create something—whether it be a memory, a dream, a story, a poem, a response to a poem—that begins to meet, to be equal to, the full complexity of our relationship to what has been lost and to the experience of loss itself. Paradoxically, in this process, we are enlivened by the experience of loss and death, even when what is given up or is taken from us is an aspect of ourselves.

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."

In this paper I comment on several aspects of the way language is used in psychoanalysis. Language is viewed not simply as a “package”; for carrying ideas and feelings, but as a medium in which thoughts and feelings are created. In the analytic setting, analyst and analysand are viewed as engaged in an effort to use language in a way that is adequate to the task of creating/conveying a sense of what it feels like for the patient to be human, to the extent that he is capable at a given moment (with particular emphasis on describing the leading anxiety that the analysand is experiencing). The analyst strives to use language in a way that embodies the tension of forever struggling to generate meaning while at every step casting doubt on the meanings “arrived at”; or “clarified.”; Forms of lifelessness of analytic language are discussed with emphasis on those forms of linguistic deadness that derive from (1) the analyst's ideological attachment to a particular school of analytic thought and (2) the analyst's ...

The author finds that the idea of analytic style better describes significant aspects of the way he practices psychoanalysis than does the notion of analytic technique. The latter is comprised to a large extent of principles of practice developed by previous generations of analysts. By contrast, the concept of analytic style, though it presupposes the analyst's thorough knowledge of analytic theory and technique, emphasizes (1) the analyst's use of his unique personality as reflected in his individual ways of thinking, listening, and speaking, his own particular use of metaphor, humor, irony, and so on; (2) the analyst's drawing on his personal experience, for example, as an analyst, an analysand, a parent, a child, a spouse, a teacher, and a student; (3) the analyst's capacity to think in a way that draws on, but is independent of, the ideas of his colleagues, his teachers, his analyst, and his analytic ancestors; and (4) the responsibility of the analyst to invent psychoanalysis freshly for each patient. Close readings of three of Bion's ‘Clinical seminars’ are presented in order to articulate some of the elements of Bion's analytic style. Bion's style is not presented as a model for others to emulate or, worse yet, imitate; rather, it is described in an effort to help the reader consider from a different vantage point (provided by the concept of analytic style) the way in which he, the reader, practices psychoanalysis.

Many patients are unable to engage in waking-dreaming in the analytic setting in the form of free association or in any other form. The author has found that ‘talking-as-dreaming’ has served as a form of waking-dreaming in which such patients have been able to begin to dream formerly undreamable experience. Such talking is a loosely structured form of conversation between patient and analyst that is often marked by primary process thinking and apparent non sequiturs. Talking-as-dreaming superficially appears to be ‘unanalytic’ in that it may seem to consist ‘merely’ of talking about such topics as books, films, etymology, baseball, the taste of chocolate, the structure of light, and so on. When an analysis is ‘a going concern,’ talking-as-dreaming moves unobtrusively into and out of talking about dreaming. The author provides two detailed clinical examples of analytic work with patients who had very little capacity to dream in the analytic setting. In the first clinical example, talking-as-dreaming served as a form of thinking and relating in which the patient was able for the first time to dream her own (and, in a sense, her father's) formerly unthinkable, undreamable experience. The second clinical example involves the use of talking-as-dreaming as an emotional experience in which the formerly ‘invisible’ patient was able to begin to dream himself into existence. The analyst, while engaging with a patient in talking-as-dreaming, must remain keenly aware that it is critical that the difference in roles of patient and analyst be a continuously felt presence; that the therapeutic goals of analysis be firmly held in mind; and that the patient be given the opportunity to dream himself into existence (as opposed to being dreamt up by the analyst).

Through a close reading of two of Searles's papers, the author explores not only what Searles thinks, but the way he thinks and how he works with patients. Searles makes use of a form of emotional responsiveness to the transference-countertransference that entails a seamless continuity of conscious and unconscious receptivity and thought. His unflinchingly honest descriptions of what is occurring in the transference-countertransference seem, as if of their own accord, to generate original clinical theory, for example, a reconceptualization of what is entailed in the successful analysis of the Oedipus complex. He demonstrates his own distinctive form of analytic thinking and interpreting, which the author describes as 'turning experience inside out'. Searles, in clinical example after clinical example, transforms what had been the invisible, unnameable emotional context of the patient's experience into verbally symbolized psychological content that is thinkable and speakable. In the final section of the paper, the author discusses an important (and unexpected) complementarity of the work of Searles and Bion. Searles's work provides clinical shape and vitality for Bion's often abstract theoretical constructions, such as the concept of the container-contained, the human need for truth, and the relationship of conscious and unconscious experience. At the same time, Bion's work provides a broader theoretical context for Searles's work.

Loewald's 'Waning of the Oedipus complex' is a watershed paper in the history of psychoanalytic thought. By means of a close reading of Loewald's paper, the author frames, discusses and clinically illustrates his understanding of Loewald's reconceptualization of the Oedipus complex. The principal elements of Loewald's reformulation include: 1) the idea that the tension between the pressures of parental infl uence and the child's innate need to establish his own capacities for originality lies at the core of the Oedipus complex; 2) the notion that oedipal parricide is driven, most fundamentally, by the child's 'urge for emancipation.' Parricide involves a revolt against, and an appropriation of, parental authority; 3) the idea that the child atones for the act of parricide by internalizing a transformed version of the child's experience of the oedipal parents. This results in an alteration of the very structure of the child's self (i.e. in the formation of the superego as the agency of autonomy and responsibility); 4) the notion that, in the child's appropriation of parental authority, he in reality 'kill[s] something vital in them...[thus] contributing to their dying' and to the succession of generations; and 5) the idea that the incestuous component of the Oedipus complex involves, in health, the creation of a transitional incestuous object relationship which, over the course of one's life, mediates the interplay between undifferentiated and differentiated aspects of self and relatedness to others. The author concludes with a comparison of Freud's and Loewald's conceptions of the Oedipus complex.

Analytic writing constitutes a literary genre of its own. It involves the linking of an analytic idea (developed in a scholarly manner) with an analytic experience created in the medium of language. What makes this literary genre so demanding is that experience--including analytic experience--does not come to us in words. This fact generates a paradox that lies at the core of analytic writing: analytic experience (which cannot be said or written) must be transformed into 'fiction' (an imaginative rendering of experience in words) in order to convey to the reader something of what is true to the emotional experience that the analyst had with the patient. The author discusses a clinical passage from one of his recently published papers in an effort to demonstrate some of the conscious and unconscious thinking that goes into his writing. He then looks closely at the way the language works in a successful piece of theoretical analytic writing. The paper concludes with a discussion of a number of facets of the author s experience with analytic writing including the psychological 'state of writing', which is at once a meditation and a wrestling match with language; experimenting with the form (structure) of an analytic essay; and the question of originality in analytic writing.

Winnicott's concept of holding and Bion's idea of the container-contained are for each of these analysts among his most important contributions to psychoanalytic thought. In this light, it is ironic that the two sets of ideas are so frequently misunderstood and confused with one another. In this paper the author delineates what he believes to be the critical aspects of each of these concepts and illustrates the way in which he uses these ideas in his clinical work. Winnicott's holding is seen as an ontological concept that is primarily concerned with being and its relationship to time. Initially the mother safeguards the infant's continuity of being, in part by insulating him from the 'not-me' aspect of time. Maturation entails the infant's gradually internalizing the mother's holding of the continuity of his being over time and emotional flux. By contrast, Bion's container-contained is centrally concerned with the processing (dreaming) of thoughts derived from lived emotional experience. The idea of the container-contained addresses the dynamic interaction of predominantly unconscious thoughts (the contained) and the capacity for dreaming and thinking those thoughts (the container).

The author discusses a fragment of the analysis of a patient who had experienced both neglect and sexual molestation during early childhood. The analysand had developed a defensively hypertrophied form of mindedness in an effort to gain some sense of control over bodily experience, which threatened not only his sanity, but his very sense of being. The focus of the paper is on a series of sessions from a period of regression during which the patient experienced psychotic-level anxiety and a feeling of impending psychic disintegration. The author discusses in detail two interventions that he made during this period of analytic work. The first involved the analyst's finding himself speaking with a parental voice with which he took on the responsibility of protectively "minding" the patient while the patient experienced himself on the edge of disintegration. The second spontaneous intervention involved the analyst's inviting the patient to imagine himself at his present age into a story of molestation (based on the patient's history and the history of the analysis) in which the analyst was a third presence bearing witness, bearing language and bearing compassion. These interventions seemed to have been of importance in facilitating the patient's development of a greater sense of being alive in a co-extensive minded body and bodied mind.

The author presents a close reading of a Frost poem and a detailed discussion of an analytic session. Using specific examples from the poem and from the analytic session, he then offers some thoughts concerning the relationship between the way he listens to the language of the poem and the way he and his patient speak with and listen to one another. The author illustrates in this reading of the poem and in the way he speaks to his patient that he is not primarily engaged in an effort to unearth what lies 'behind' the poem's words and symbols or 'beneath' the patient's report of a dream or of a life event. Instead (or perhaps more accurately, in addition), he attempts to listen to the sound and feel of 'what's going on', to the 'music of what happens'. This is achieved to a significant degree in the analytic setting by means of the analyst's attending to his own reverie experience.

In this paper I suggest that the analysis of perversion necessarily involves the elaboration and analysis of a perverse transference countertransference. Both analyst and analysand contribute to and participate in the perverse transference-countertransference which intersubjective construction is powerfully shaped by the perverse structure of the patient's unconscious internal object world. In the fragment of an analysis that is presented, I illustrate the way in which the analyst makes use of his experience in (of) the transference-countertransference in gaining understanding of the perverse scenario that the patient is utilizing as a form of psychic organization, defense, communication, and object relatedness. I discuss the analyst's use of his own unobtrusive, mundane thoughts, feelings, fantasies, ruminations, sensations, and so on, in the service of understanding the perverse transference-countertransference, which understanding is utilized in the formulation of transference interpretations. The perversity of the transference-countertransference is viewed as deriving from the patient's defensive use of particular forms of sexualization as a way of protecting himself or herself against the experience of psychological deadness. Compulsive erotization is understood as representing a method of creating an illusory sense of vitality. The subversion of the recognition of the experience of psychological deadness is achieved in part through compulsively enlisting others in the enactment of exciting, erotized. and often dangerous substitutes for the experience of being alive.

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.

Introduction ALTHOUGH A SIGNIFICANT PROPORTION OF the world's analysts are Kleinian analysts, a serious consideration of the work of Melanie Klein has not been a major part of the dialogue that constitutes American psychoanalytic thinking. Too often, when Klein's theory is considered, it is scrutinized only long enough to be dismissed on the basis of one "untenable" idea or another, such as Klein's conception of the death instinct, her developmental timetable, her theory of technique, and so on. My intention is not to proselytize, for I am not a Kleinian and have profound disagreements with many aspects of her work; rather my aim is to present Klein's thinking in a light that might account for the important influence her ideas have had on the development of psychoanalytic thought outside of the United States. In particular, Klein has had a powerful influence on the development of British object relations theory; although this as