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Subjects of Analysis

Author(s) : Thomas Ogden

Reviews and Endorsements

'In this brilliant contribution to psychoanalytic theory and practice, Thomas Ogden has once again challenged psychoanalytic clinicians to expand the conceptual envelopes that confines and constricts their work. Sounding the death knell for the positivist view of patient and analyst as discrete subject and object, he forges a contemporary, de-centred entity - the analytic third. This joint creation is neither subject nor object but a fortuitous convergence of two subjectives that forms the crucible of the analytic enterprise. Clinicians who read this book will find that their work is profoundly transformed. Ogden has provided us with one of the most original and compelling contributions in recent years.'
- Glen O. Gabbard, Distinguished Professor, The Manager Clinic and The Karl Menninger School of Psychiatry

'This book is a work of dedication, of beauty, and of art. It helps us come to grips with a depth and with a totality of intersubjective intimacy in analytic work that has hitherto been difficult to conceive. One's work with patients and how one conceptualizes it will forever changed from one's experience in reading these pages. Mine already has.'
- James S. Grotstein

'Thomas Ogden is one of the most creative and interesting writers currently contributing to psychoanalytic theory. In this brilliant book he develops the concept of human "I-ness" a "third term", which is neither subject nor subject, but which arises out of a dialectic between them. The dialectic is not single, but multiple and complex, involving an interplay between conscious and unconscious, and between fantasy and reality. Out of this multi-layered dialectic emerges a unified experience having about it a kind of doubleness. This idea is fundamental, but relatively unexplored. Ogden's concept of the "analytic third" is original. He leads us beyond mere ego. And a limited self, towards a larger view of subjectivity.'
- Professor Russell Meares, Westmead Hospital, Australia

Subjects of Analysis is a work of incomparable significance for the field of psychoanalysis. Ogden reworks and recombines the basic contributions of Freud, Klein and Winnicott to create a vision of the analytic process that has never existed before, startling in its freshness, moving in its depth and integrity. But Ogden's work has broader significance, beyond psychoanalysis, as one of the most powerful and poetic renderings of the forms and textures in the struggle of people, at the end of the 20th century, for personal meaning and interpersonal connection.'
- Stephen Mitchell