When Thomas Ogden invited us to “rediscover psychoanalysis for ourselves’ he invited us to discover psychoanalysis as a deeply personal and constantly evolving therapeutic experience. ”After all psychoanalysis both as a set of ideas and as a therapeutic method is from beginning to end a process of thinking and rethinking, dreaming and re-dreaming, discovering and rediscovering” (Ogden).
Ogden’s invitation entices us to think, rethink and rediscover what psychoanalysis can mean for us as a therapeutic method and as a way of understanding human experience.To re-discover psychoanalysis for ourselves is an invitation to create psychoanalysis anew in ways that work for who we are, what we believe to be useful in psychological growth, and utilize our unique capacities and abilities in engaging others in conversation. To an extent we are invited to “throw away the book” (Hoffman), to rely less on the dictates of analytic rules and procedures, less on efforts to offer correct “psychoanalytic” interpretations (which is what we focus on, Bion says, “when we are nervous of not being real analysts”), and more on who we are, what we have come to know from our own lived experiences, and from our learned and earned understandings of what it is that matters in living. To an extent Ogden’s invitation places a significant amount of responsibility on analysts and patients to re-discover themselves in direct conversation with each other and manage the stress we inevitably put on each other as different and unique thinkers and individuals.
The view of psychoanalysis simply as an explanatory system, one that explains people to themselves, and that offers answers to what things really mean, undermine the analysts’ and patients’ own unique ways of understanding the problems that inevitably occur in living and undermine the co-operative and co-reflective activity that can be so healing. When psychoanalysis is seen as a discipline of understanding, of hermeneutics (Stern), of inviting and tolerating conflicting perspectives, rather than that of simply explaining, then a relationship of subject to subject, of mutuality, and of equality, enter the room and a dialogue and cooperative spirit of co-inquiry, co-participation (Fiscalini, Wolstein) can follow.
We try to understand the patient's problems as they see them, their assessment of what bothers them and what they believe stands in their way of solving their perceived problems. We ask what their reasoning is for how and why this problem persists. We wonder conjointly about its origin and its purpose. As equal subjects with minds of our own, we might be thinking how these issues and proposed solutions compare to our own ways of operating. Would we see things and try to solve them similarly? We draw on our learned theories and knowledge to offer alternate formulations, perhaps different ways of perceiving the same problem, perhaps ways of thinking that diminish the sting of the problem, perhaps our own ideas of where this problem might come from and what it serves. As equals these ideas are put forth as Bollas says: “to be kicked around, played with and discarded if needed”. We do not have, nor is there, a privileged position of knowing or any final say on what something means. Not even of ourselves and our intentions. Just as we offer thoughts to our patients they offer their thoughts to us (sometimes directly and often implicitly) about who we are to them and what we might intend. Just as we don’t have the final word neither do they. This is the negotiation of meaning between respectful and coequal partners. And it is here that psychoanalysis has the potential to offer an experience that almost equals no other. We slow down, we actually look for and perhaps even make problems, in order to think anew and rediscover new perspectives. Rather than rushing on to being “fine” or “great” or “healed” or resolved, as our society might demand, we stop, we think, we feel, we share, we look for life under rocks and we delight in the mystery and vastness of living.