The Primitive Edge of Experience by Thomas H Ogden

The Primitive Edge of Experience by Thomas H Ogden

"This is an extraordinary and exciting book, the work of a truly original and creative psychoanalytic theoretician and most astute clinician. Ogden continues to expand and to deepen his reformulations of the British object-relations theorists, M. Klein, W. R. Bion, D. W. Winnicott, W. R. D. Fairbairn, H. Guntrip, to illuminate further the world of internalized object relations. His concepts are evolutionary and at times revolutionary. Exploring the area of human experience that lies beyond the psychological territories addressed by the previous theorists, he introduces the concept of an autistic-contiguous mode as a way of conceiving of the most primitive psychological organization through which the sensory "floor" of the experience of self is generated. He conceives of this mode as a sensory-dominated, presymbolic area of experience in which the most primitive form of meaning is generated on the basis of organization of sensory impressions, particularly at the skin surface. A major tenet in the book is a conceptualization of human experience throughout life as the product of a dialectical interplay among three modes of generating experience: the depressive, the paranoid-schizoid, and the autistic-contiguous. Each mode creates, preserves, and negates the other. No single mode of generating experience exists independently of the others. Psychopathology is conceptualized as a "collapse" of the dialectic in the direction of one or another mode of generating experience. The outcome of such collapse may be entrapment in rigid, asymbolic patterns of sensation (collapse in the direction of the autistic-contiguous mode), or imprisonment in a world of omnipotent internal objects where thoughts and feelings are experienced as things and forces which occupy or bombard the self (collapse in the direction of paranoid-schizoid mode) or isolation of the self from lived experience and aliveness of bodily, sensations (collapse in the direction of the depressive mode). Ogden presents his unique development of the autisti

Reading this book left me feeling that I had come across one of those rare works which induce us to rethink, in an unaccustomed way, our ideas about mental functioning and the analytic processIts gentle and unpretentious style leads you by the hand through an array of English and French analytic works which are less familiar to the American reader, such as Klein, Bion, Bollas, Bick, Meltzer, Fairbairn, Tustin and Winnicott, on to Anzieu, Green, McDougall, Chasseguet-Smirgel and, finally, Lacan. This is added to many American writers who are much more familiar. -- Monique V. King * The International Journal of Psychoanalysis *
In this magnificent book, Ogden illuminates the darkest recesses of the human psyche with his brilliant formulation of the autistic-contiguous position. He also provides refreshing new perspectives on the Oedipus complex and female psychology. With this impressive contribution, Thomas Ogden has come into his own as one of the most creative and original psychoanalytic thinkers of our time. -- Glen Gabbard

Thomas H. Ogden, M.D., is a graduate of Amherst College, the Yale School of Medicine, and the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute. He has served as an associate psychiatrist at the Tavistock Clinic, London, and is currently Co-director of the Center for the Advanced Study of the Psychoses, a member of the faculty of the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute, and a supervising and personal analyst at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California. He teaches, supervises, and maintains a private practice of psychoanalysis in San Francisco.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780876682906
ISBN 10	0876682905
Title	The Primitive Edge of Experience
Author	Thomas H Ogden
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Jason Aronson Inc. Publishers
Year published	1992-12-01
Number of pages	254
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note	Unavailable