Psychoanalyse • Psychotherapie • Coaching • Dr. Gunnar Reefschläger

24/10/2025

In Reverie and Interpretation and later in The Analytic Third (1994), Ogden extends and deepens ideas from Winnicott, Bion, and Fairbairn, proposing that the mind is not an isolated entity but rather a relational achievement.

The “mind,” in Ogden’s view, is co-created between people, and this co-creation is continuous throughout life — especially within the psychoanalytic relationship.

Ogden suggests that from the beginning of life, our psychic life forms in the space between self and other — in the intersubjective field. A baby’s emerging selfhood depends on the caregiver’s emotional attunement and imaginative capacity to “think” the baby’s experience.

For example: When a mother senses a baby’s distress and responds empathically, she is not only soothing the child — she is helping the baby develop a mind that can feel and think about its own experience.

19/09/2025

Ogden, following Winnicott and Bion, reframes the meaning of interpretations. Interpretation is not the essence of psychoanalysis. It’s only useful if it helps create new experiences. The real work happens when the analytic relationship creates conditions for the patient to think, feel, and experience in new ways. This process occurs through language — not language as a fixed tool, but language as something that shapes reality.

Psychoanalysis becomes less about discovering truth already there and more about creating the possibility of new forms of being.

When Ogden says that ”Psychoanalysis is not primarily a science of interpretation, but a way of creating the conditions in which new forms of experiencing and thinking become possible through the medium of language,” he’s emphasizing that:

- The analytic process is ontological (about being), not just epistemological (about knowing).
- It’s less about revealing hidden truths, and more about making life livable in new ways, by enabling the patient to think, dream, and experience what was previously unthinkable or unspeakable.

In short: Ogden moves psychoanalysis from the idea of finding meaning to making meaning possible.

13/09/2025

23/07/2025

In Kleinian theory, phantasies (with a ph, to distinguish from conscious fantasies) are unconscious mental representations - primitive, pre-verbal imaginations or dramatizations that arise from instinctual drives, especially the life (Eros) and death (Thanatos) instincts.

According to Klein, the mother’s breast - often the first object of satisfaction, frustration, and ambivalence - becomes the prototype for all later mental representations of others (“objects”). The infant projects love, hate, greed, envy, and anxiety onto the breast, forming the core of later object relations.

In Kleinian Terms: All subsequent relations with people and with the world are colored by the infant’s phantasies about the breast - whether it is good or bad, whether it gives or withholds, whether it is loved or hated.
(paraphrased from The Psychoanalysis of Children)

16/07/2025

Klein believed that from the earliest stages of life, a baby does not experience the world in a neutral or purely positive way. Instead, the baby experiences ambivalence - holding both love and hate toward the same object (usually the mother or the breast).

When a baby feels frustration- say, from a hungry cry not being answered quickly - it may hate the very same breast or mother it also loves when its needs are met. This contradiction gives rise to internal conflict, but Klein argued that:
- Love is not destroyed by hate.
- In fact, the ability to tolerate ambivalence (loving someone even while also feeling angry with them) is a key developmental milestone.
- The resolution of hate through love and reparation actually deepens love.

Klein saw this dynamic in what she called the “depressive position” - a stage where the infant becomes aware that the “good breast” and “bad breast” are the same person. This realization causes guilt and a desire to repair the harm done in phantasy. This process of reparation strengthens emotional bonds and intensifies the infant’s capacity for real, mature love.

So, in simpler terms: We come to love more deeply not by avoiding conflict, but by working through the inner tensions of love and hate toward the people we care about.