Thomas Ogden Interview

How psychoanalyst Thomas Ogden found his true self in fiction - Books - Haaretz.com https://www.haaretz.com/life/books/.premium.MAGAZINE-how-psychoanalyst-thomas-ogden-found...
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Thomas Ogden. Credit: Derek Yarra
1 of 20 16/09/2018, 20:24
By Noya Kohavi | Mar 29, 2017
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SAN FRANCISCO – Dr. Thomas Ogden seats himself in his

therapist’s chair; I’m on a chair at the other end of the room.
Between us is a narrow bed, its head facing him. In his clinic, on
the ground floor of his San Francisco home, Ogden, a highly
regarded psychoanalyst, lecturer, training therapist and author of
numerous books and articles, looks completely in his comfort
zone. In the background a handsome library is visible, and on the
walls are abstract images that will be familiar to anyone who has
ever been in therapy – monochromatic shades, lines that don’t
commit to a figure, something to stare at and fill with meaning.
Ogden is pleasant, soft-spoken, curious. He looks younger than

his 70 years. It’s clear that he’s skilled at forging rapid intimacy
with strangers, a talent that has made him one of the most
riveting and innovative psychoanalysts of his generation. He
rarely gives interviews, but he propelled our meeting with
continuous speech that sometimes proved a challenge to direct.
Even though he is in the therapist’s chair, it seems as though it’s
2 of 20 16/09/2018, 20:24
Israelthe fundamental
News rule of
All sections psychoanalysis
Manafort – which
Syria strike demands
China that the
Gaza Uman Woodward shekels Kushner Log in
analysand share his free associations unfiltered – that is guiding
his speech. He talks about his life, both professional and personal,
with great openness. In the first 10 minutes of our conversation
he tells me that he was seven the first time he saw his mother cry,
after the death of her psychoanalyst.
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It’s apparently more important for him to ensure that he will be

understood than to preserve mystery as a storyteller or a
therapist. But Ogden is fascinating and entertaining, and the way
he tells his life story sheds light on his work as a psychoanalyst, a
writer, even as a baby boomer.
The excuse for our meeting is the publication in Hebrew of his

debut novel, “The Parts Left Out” (2014). In the meantime he’s
learned that his second novel, “In the Hands of Gravity and
Chance” (2016), will also be appearing in Hebrew. His career as a
writer of fiction followed decades of authoring psychoanalytical
texts. Readers in Israel are familiar with some of them: “The
Matrix of the Mind,” “The Primitive Edge of Experience,”
“Rediscovering Psychoanalysis” and “On Not Being Able to
Dream” were successful both within and outside the
psychoanalytic community.
3 of 20 16/09/2018, 20:24
IsraelThe fact that

News his professional
All sections Manafortbooks were
Syria published
strike China in Israel
Gaza and
Uman Woodward shekels Kushner Log in
commercially successful there surprised him, but he has an
explanation. “I think that Jewish people – I’m Jewish – value
introspection in a way that mainstream America does not,” he
says, adding, “Jews have been interpreting texts forever, and
language is text. It’s just part of the genes of the people.”
Ogden’s psychoanalytic writing declines to adhere to one

particular school. He’s very much influenced by Donald
Winnicott, who was one of the leading analysts in the British
object relations school (we’ll get back to him later), and by
Melanie Klein and Wilfred Bion. Ogden has written extensively
about all three, but his theory, which is not generalized or
comprehensive, turned in other directions as well. His approach
to psychoanalysis, and his writing on the subject, is often
described not as diagnostic procedure but as textual analysis.
The first thing that stands out in Ogden’s writing is that it’s
comprehensible. Writing about psychoanalysis tends to be
tangled or jargonized. Not with Ogden. At times the simplicity
with which he presents his ideas sounds confessional, such as in
his articles about reveries as a metaphor for the subconscious. In
these pieces, he offers examples from thoughts that pass through
his own mind while sitting in the therapist’s seat, such as a
personal letter he has to respond to, something he said to a friend
that sounds silly in retrospect, everyday tasks. Apparent
distractions.
In one such case, he writes about a patient who told him that his
4 of 20 16/09/2018, 20:24
Israelwife
Newscomplained, manyManafort
All sections years intoSyria
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marriage, that he
China wasn’tUman
Gaza Woodward shekels Kushner Log in
one hundred percent hers. The patient relates that, from his point
of view, that’s not a sign that he’s going to leave her; rather, it’s
what makes it possible for him to stay with her. Ogden here
describes a thin line between the feeling of “not being there” and
the feeling that an “element of privacy” is essential even while one
feels “emotionally present with another person.” He draws a
parallel between the patient’s experience and his, and the reverie,
in this sense, is a process in which metaphors are created that give
form to the analyst’s experience of the unconscious dimension of
the analytical relationship.
The story of how he came to literary writing, Ogden begins with –

not surprisingly – his mother. She loved to read herself, and
encouraged him to read. In high school, he chose a book by Freud
from the summer reading list, and from there the road to
psychoanalysis was clear to him. The two lines – literature and
psychoanalysis – operate in parallel in his life.
5 of 20 16/09/2018, 20:24
Sigmund Freud ‫ן‬n his working room in 1938.
“When I was three, my mother went into analysis, and even

though she never talked to me about it, there were always her
‘appointments,’” he relates. “As a three- or four-year-old, I didn’t
know what an ‘appointment’ meant, but I did know that she left
the house and there was [an additional] presence in our family.
Along with my brother, who is two years younger, and my father
and mother, there was always in my mind a fifth person at the
table. For years this was never formulated, was never conceived of
as more than a feeling, and actually the first time I saw my mother
cry was when her analyst died, when I was seven.”
His parents, who he says were “thickly Jewish” culturally, had

grown up in the same New York neighborhood. His father did not
6 of 20 16/09/2018, 20:24
Israelgo to college,
News “not because
All sections he wasn’t
Manafort Syriaintelligent
strike enough,Gaza
China but Uman Woodward shekels Kushner Log in
because he was a poor student. His mind did not work the way the
system works. He was passionate about English – sorry, that’s a
slip – about music, and his first job was as an usher at Carnegie
Hall, so he could get free admission to the concerts. My mother,
as I said, was an avid reader. She was a very intelligent woman,
and even though her mind, too, did not work in the structure of
schools, she did go to college.
“I found that my mind actually worked well within the system of

education,” he continues, “so I was a good student. She was
amazed and she kept saying she didn’t know where I came from.”
Giving you great material for at least 10 years of analysis.
“Yes, she was wonderful. She just died a year and a quarter ago, at
age 94. She went into hospice in my brother’s house and I read
her the second novel, which I dedicated to her.”
Ogden grew up in the suburbs of New York. “It was a different

era, which I feel fortunate to have grown up in. It wasn’t the era of
play dates. We kids would ride our bikes to an open field and we
would play baseball using a rock for each base. And if a parent
came along to collect one of the children, everything would
stop. It wasn’t for adults. I’m sad that my own children did not
have that. For them everything was arranged by the parents. It
was awful.”
After high school, Ogden became a literature and premed student

at Amherst College in Massachusetts. There he had what he terms
7 of 20 16/09/2018, 20:24
Israel“the
Newsmost
Allimportant
sections learning
Manafort experience in myChina
Syria strike whole life”
Gazaduring
his freshman year, in English literature. Three times a week the
students had to write a page-and-a-half-long essay. The topics
were very interesting, Ogden recalls. “One was to describe a
situation in which you were being sincere. So then the next class
the assignment was to describe a situation in which you were
being insincere. And the third one was to describe the difference
in your writing of the two. It was a wonderful experience, because
[it meant that] I was writing all the time. From that point on, I
knew that writing was going to be an important part of my life.”
He then went on to Yale University to study medicine, which at

that time was a requirement for psychoanalysis. He’s been writing
papers and books in his field for 40 years. “When I’m with a
patient,” he notes, “what’s at issue is addressing emotional
problems. But from the beginning, I also wanted to be a writer,
and when you come to write about the psychoanalytic experience
you are no longer helping the patient. It becomes a literary
problem involving the structure of the article.”
8 of 20 16/09/2018, 20:24
9 of 20 16/09/2018, 20:24
Thomas Ogden. Credit: Derek Yarra

‘The most boring thing in the world’
One of the most popular aspects of Ogden’s analytic writing is his

case descriptions, which fashion characters and their stories
richly and elegantly, but with no unnecessary verbiage. Even
though he doesn’t want his novel “The Parts Left Out,” in which
one of the characters undergoes psychiatric treatment, to be
understood as a type of case description, he does treat case
descriptions as a type of literary fiction.
“Most analysts aspire to be scientific, which I think is ridiculous,”

Ogden says. “Psychoanalysis is not a natural science – at best it’s
a social science and probably closer to a literary experience, an
experience in language. The case descriptions are fictions, even
though they are based on actual experiences with
people. Experiences and writing are not the same. You’re actually
imagining the experience, or the person, whom you have to
somehow capture in language.
“If you’ve ever seen a transcript of a session, it’s the most boring
thing in the world. It’s dry, because it hasn’t captured any of the
feeling or tone of voice, intonation, all the ways in which language
is expressive. So when you’re writing about a case, you’re writing
to create that music.”
Does that make it more enjoyable to read, or does it convey your

message better?
10 of 20 16/09/2018, 20:24
Israel“Both.
News What’s important
All sections is beautySyria
Manafort in the language,
strike Chinawhich doesn’t
mean floweriness – there can be very simple beauty. And that’s
important.”
Are there writers you learned this from?
“The master of this, the genius, is Winnicott. For me, Winnicott is

the finest writer of the English language. Each of his papers is a
gem. He writes articles half the length of the standard. Which
brings me to talk about novel-writing, in part because of all the
details that are left out.”
Winnicott (1896-1971) was a pediatrician and psychoanalyst who

wrote many articles about the mother-child relationship and
about the importance of games to preserve the feeling of
substantiality, aliveness and authenticity. One of his best-known
concepts is that of the “transitional object, the “true self,” which
allows a child to feel a connection with others and with the body
and its processes, and to experience a sense of being
spontaneously alive, in contrast to a “false self,” a defense
mechanism that masks the true self in order to meet others’
expectations. Like Ogden, Winnicott is not associated with any
one psychoanalytic school. Instead, he borrows from theoretical
propositions and creates his own independent theory.
11 of 20 16/09/2018, 20:24
Donald Winnicott. Credit: Northwestern Psychoanalytic Society and Institute
So you knew you wanted to be a writer, but for years you wrote
in an academic context. How did the first novel come about?
“I was an apprentice for about 40 years before I decided to try my

hand at writing fiction. I had actually been dishonest with myself.
12 of 20 16/09/2018, 20:24
IsraelPeople
News would say, ‘Your
All sections case examples
Manafort are veryChina
Syria strike compelling
Gaza – have
you ever thought about writing fiction?’ And I would say, ‘Sure I
have thought about it, but I don’t do it because I don’t have the
talent for it.’ And that was the self-deception, because I never
tried it.
"Finally I decided in my 60s that I didn’t have all the time in the
world, so I tried. My first effort was a semi-autobiographical thing
based on my family’s history and my parents growing up as Jews
in New York City. But I ran into a big problem: I didn’t feel it was
right to say too much about what my mother was telling me about
the family, but if I said too little it was boring.”
Ogden continues, “While searching for a plot, I spoke to a friend

who told me about a member of his family who was homeless in a
city in this country. I asked him if, growing up with her, he had
had any sort of clue that she was in very severe psychological
difficulty. He said no, the only thing that came to mind is that she
sucked her thumb into adolescence and her parents had her wear
a glove to bed to help her break the habit. And a whole plot came
to mind in response.
“I wrote a short story, which essentially was the first two or three
chapters of the novel, where a boy and his mother are locked in a
battle over his sucking his thumb. She tries the ointment and the
glove and then just completely loses it, goes after him with a
knife; the father intercedes, pushes her and knocks her so hard
she dies. That was the end of the short story. And I actually used
these words talking to myself: ‘There are too many parts left out.’
13 of 20 16/09/2018, 20:24
IsraelHow
Newsis itAll
that in this family
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to this,China
that a mother
Gaza goes
after a child with a knife, and the husband kills the wife. That
can’t stand as a short story, there are too many parts left out.”
“The Parts Left Out” is set in a small Midwestern town,

surrounded by flat open spaces covered with wheat and corn. The
world of the novel is small, isolated and narrow, composed of
neighbors from nearby farms, members of the local church, the
druggist, the deputy sheriff – and they too are remote from the
family unit of mother, father, daughter and son who show
different faces externally and internally. The novel traces the
characters’ lives and describes the circumstances that led to the
mother’s violent death in her house (already in the first chapter).
But it also notes, time and again, the limits of the ability to
understand, explain and describe, and points to the shadows of
the parts that have been left out, between the characters as well as
between the narrator and the reader.
“For me, some of the most important aspects of writing lie in the
effects created by the parts left out,” Ogden observes. “They
create mystery, suspense, the plausible and
yet inexplicable. Leaving out parts shows respect for the reader’s
ability not only to be affected by what he or she reads, but also to
participate in the writing of the novel.”
The book’s dialogues appear to be replete with indirect,

unconnected responses, “even seeming non-sequiturs,” Ogden
points out, and explains, “I say ‘seeming,’ because they make
sense, more or less, but at a depth that is not always within the
14 of 20 16/09/2018, 20:24
Israelawareness
News Allof the reader
sections or my
Manafort own awareness
Syria strike as I wrote.
China I
hesitate to call that depth ‘the unconscious,’ because, in general, I
don’t like the use of psychoanalytic terminology and concepts in
the discussion of literature. They offer pseudo-explanations,
explanations that sound scientific,
but actually limit imaginative possibility.”
How does fiction writing differ from writing a case description?
“I try to leave the psychoanalysis behind. I try very hard. When I

write novels, I’m a novelist, and when I’m with patients, I’m an
analyst. With one, it’s a completely literary experience and I’m
free to do anything, and the price for doing anything is that you’re
given nothing, you have to make the whole thing up. But when I
meet a patient in the waiting room for the very first time, there’s
so much that I’m given – the way the patient looks at me, whether
they’re standing or sitting, the pace and gait and the muscular
tension with which they walk into the office. They’re giving an
enormous amount of information.”
In his article “Reverie and Metaphor,” Ogden offers a similar

description of the acute attention the therapist must give the
patient. The development of an “analytic sensitivity,” he
maintains, “centrally involves the enhancement of the analyst’s
capacity to feel in a visceral way the alive moments of an analytic
session.” Elaborating, he explains: “to hear that a word or a
phrase has been used in an interesting, unexpected way; to notice
that a patient’s glance in the waiting room feels coy or apologetic
or steamy; to sense that a message left on one’s answering
15 of 20 16/09/2018, 20:24
Israelmachine
News feels
All dangerously,
sections and
Manafort yet alluringly,
Syria strike mysterious;
China Gazato Uman Woodward shekels Kushner Log in
experience in a bodily way that a period of silence in the hour
feels like lying in bed with a spouse whom one has loved for many
years, but who now feels like a stranger.”
You’ve written about the sensitivity to details and its importance

for therapy. How did you develop that?
“I think it’s part temperament. I’ve always had a very intense

temperament, I experience things at high volume, for better and
for worse. I think that since that college course, I’ve read things in
two ways at the same time. I put myself into the piece of fiction or
poetry, and I also think about how are they doing this. And that’s
always of equal importance to how they are making me feel.”
What do you wish to give the reader of your fiction? In your

analytic writing you talk about concepts in psychoanalysis or
your experiences as an analyst. But what about in the novel?
“That’s not quite right. I don’t think of my analytic papers as

instructive. I aspire but do not have any delusions of being
anywhere near Winnicott. I aspire to give the reader an
experience that is as much emotional as conceptual. One of
Winnicott’s most fundamental ideas is that analysis requires, as
an insufficient but nonetheless necessary condition, the patient
and analyst to live and experience together, and then learn from
that experience. And I think that’s what I aspire to. To be able to
create in a literary form an experience for the reader to live
together with me as the writer, and come out changed by it. That
is where I put all the emphasis, both in therapy, analysis and also
16 of 20 16/09/2018, 20:24
Israelin literature,
News in film,
All sections inManafort
any form of art.strike
Syria China Gaza Uman Woodward shekels Kushner Log in
“The important thing is not what a person learns or even what

they remember, but how they are changed by the experience.
That’s also true of a dream: a dream is important only to the
extent that we are changed by it. We don’t even have to remember
it – something’s happened that’s made us different. That really is
what I aspire to, that when a person finishes the novel, they feel
changed, they’re just a little bit different from what they were
before.”
Do you want to specify in what way they’re changed?
Ogden laughs. “No. That’s very important, too, and again it’s what
Winnicott does so well. What’s important is to leave space open
for the person to do something of their own with it. And what you
do and what I do and what every other person does is different. I
think of it as a form of receptivity, a form of openness on the part
of the person who’s taking part, and it’s different in analysis than
in writing, because everyone is reading the same book. For Freud,
the fundamental rule was that you say everything that’s on your
mind, you don’t keep any secrets. For me, the fundamental rule is
that you create a conversation with this person that you’ve had
with no other person. It’s very different from reading a book,
apart from the receptivity of the reader, who may or may not be
open to or even interested in this kind of experience.
“For example,” he continues, “in ‘The Parts Left Out,’ it’s an

experience of wrestling with helplessness to extricate oneself from
something that feels dangerous. The husband, Earl, struggles with
17 of 20 16/09/2018, 20:24
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Newsthe whole time,
All sections soManafort
there’s a kind
Syriaof sense of
strike fate against
China Gaza Uman Woodward shekels Kushner Log in
which he’s struggling. Some people experience that very
immediately in their lives and are moved and changed by a book
that takes on that kind of theme, and others aren’t.”
I read the book differently. For me it was about consequences

and led me to ask why the characters do what they do, in regard
to the random quality of certain decisions in life that lead to
consequences you could never have imagined.
“I say this genuinely: I put more faith in your reading of the book
than in mine. I really do. An artist friend told me that he read, I
don’t know where, that a well-known artist met a critic who asked
about one of his paintings, and the artist said, ‘I do the painting
and I leave the thinking to others.’ And I really do think that
about the book: I do the writing and I leave the thinking about it
to you, and I think it’s better thinking than I can do.”
“For me,” he adds in an email a few days later, “the act of writing
must include my own surprise in response to what the novel is
becoming. I don’t begin with an idea of where the story is going.
When writing is going well, I am surprised by what I am writing. I
keep asking myself, What is this novel about? And I can only
begin to answer the question after the novel feels complete to me,
and I feel that this is the place to stop. Life isn’t like that. The
story of life does not find a place to stop, it just continues, and we
have to keep asking, what is it about?”
18 of 20 16/09/2018, 20:24
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How psychoanalyst Thomas Ogden found his true self in fiction - Books - Haaretz.com https://www.haaretz.com/life/books/.premium.MAGAZINE-how-psychoanalyst-thomas-ogden-found...

Thomas Ogden. Credit: Derek Yarra

By Noya Kohavi | Mar 29, 2017

36 Tweet 1 Zen Subscribe

SAN FRANCISCO – Dr. Thomas Ogden seats himself in his

Ogden is pleasant, soft-spoken, curious. He looks younger than

I'd like to recieve emails on offers, appeals and commercial info

It’s apparently more important for him to ensure that he will be

The excuse for our meeting is the publication in Hebrew of his

IsraelThe fact that

Ogden’s psychoanalytic writing declines to adhere to one

The story of how he came to literary writing, Ogden begins with –

Sigmund Freud ‫ן‬n his working room in 1938.

“When I was three, my mother went into analysis, and even

His parents, who he says were “thickly Jewish” culturally, had

“I found that my mind actually worked well within the system of

Giving you great material for at least 10 years of analysis.

Ogden grew up in the suburbs of New York. “It was a different

After high school, Ogden became a literature and premed student

He then went on to Yale University to study medicine, which at

Thomas Ogden. Credit: Derek Yarra

‘The most boring thing in the world’

One of the most popular aspects of Ogden’s analytic writing is his

“Most analysts aspire to be scientific, which I think is ridiculous,”

Does that make it more enjoyable to read, or does it convey your

Are there writers you learned this from?

“The master of this, the genius, is Winnicott. For me, Winnicott is

Winnicott (1896-1971) was a pediatrician and psychoanalyst who

Donald Winnicott. Credit: Northwestern Psychoanalytic Society and Institute

“I was an apprentice for about 40 years before I decided to try my

Ogden continues, “While searching for a plot, I spoke to a friend

“The Parts Left Out” is set in a small Midwestern town,

The book’s dialogues appear to be replete with indirect,

How does fiction writing differ from writing a case description?

“I try to leave the psychoanalysis behind. I try very hard. When I

In his article “Reverie and Metaphor,” Ogden offers a similar

You’ve written about the sensitivity to details and its importance

“I think it’s part temperament. I’ve always had a very intense

What do you wish to give the reader of your fiction? In your

“That’s not quite right. I don’t think of my analytic papers as

“The important thing is not what a person learns or even what

Do you want to specify in what way they’re changed?

“For example,” he continues, “in ‘The Parts Left Out,’ it’s an

I read the book differently. For me it was about consequences

Sort comments by Newest first Expand all

1 Whisper | 22:54 07.01.2018 0 0

Israel News Archaeology Columnists ‫הארץ‬

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