Psychoanalyse • Psychotherapie • Coaching • Dr. Gunnar Reefschläger

12/12/2025

Ogden is emphasizing that psychoanalysis cannot be a standardized, repetitive procedure.
Instead, every therapeutic encounter must be shaped — moment by moment — by the unique psychology of the patient, the evolving relationship, and the emotional field shared between the two.

A good analyst does not apply the same tone, stance, rhythm, or style to every patient.
The analyst must adapt, shift, and transform themselves in response to each patient’s inner world.

Ogden (following Winnicott and Bion) believed that the analyst’s personality and unconscious are always part of the analytic field.

Different patients draw out:
• different emotions
• different reveries
• different tones
• different forms of language
• different kinds of presence

This variation is essential, not accidental.
The “analytic third” — a concept Ogden developed — is the shared psychological field created by analyst and patient together.

Because each pair creates a different “third,” the analyst’s way of being shifts with each patient.
Thus, no two sessions can look — or sound — alike.

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.

29/06/2025

This quote encapsulates one of the most fundamental and controversial aspects of Klein’s metapsychology: her development and elaboration of Freud’s death instinct concept.

Freud introduced the idea of the death drive (Thanatos) in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), proposing a counterforce to the life drive (Eros). Klein radically expanded this idea, positing that from birth, the psyche is shaped by a dynamic struggle between:
- The life instinct – constructive, loving, binding, and reparative forces.
- The death instinct – destructive, envious, and aggressive forces.

Klein believed that these instincts operate from the very beginning of life, not just post-traumatically, and that anxiety arises primarily from the internal activity of the death instinct.

Klein argued that primitive anxiety—especially in infancy—is generated by fears of internal annihilation caused by internal destructive impulses. This is not primarily fear of the external world, but of internal processes:
- The infant’s unconscious phantasies of attacking and destroying the good object (e.g. the mother’s breast) generate guilt and fear of retaliation.
- These destructive phantasies are fueled by the death instinct.
So, anxiety is not accidental or merely reactive—it is the psyche’s response to internal aggression.

Klein’s model helps explain why some individuals, even in the presence of love or support, remain deeply anxious, envious, or persecuted. It suggests that:
- These individuals may be struggling with dominant internal aggression that overwhelms their life instincts.
- Effective therapeutic work involves strengthening the life instincts: supporting the ego’s capacity for love, symbolization, and reparation.

This is not about eradicating aggression but helping the patient live with it and limit its power.

20/06/2025

Klein believed that the child - and later, the adult - moves constantly between feelings of:
- Love and hate
- Joy and sorrow
- Gratitude and envy
- Safety and persecution

These opposites coexist in varying degrees and intensity. They are not pathological in themselves; rather, they are core features of emotional life, especially in the early stages of development and during regression in therapy.

Klein stresses that a good interpretation isn’t merely about offering insight or intellectual understanding. Instead, it must:
- Track the patient’s moment-to-moment internal states
- Reflect the emotional rhythm of the patient’s oscillation between love and hate
- Respect the patient’s current ego capacity and emotional tolerability

For example, when a patient shifts from gratitude toward the therapist to suspicion and persecutory fear, the interpretation must acknowledge and validate these shifts without judgment or premature integration.

This quote implies a warning against overly rational or overly “positive” interpretations. If the analyst ignores the darker, persecutory feelings and only supports love or happiness, they risk repeating early splits and reinforcing denial or idealization.

True therapeutic work involves sitting with contradictions: holding space for the patient to feel both love and hate toward the same object (often the analyst), without forcing resolution too quickly.

13/06/2025

In early infancy, the ego deals with overwhelming anxieties (especially from the death instinct) by splitting objects (e.g., the mother) into “good” and “bad” parts:
- The good object (e.g., a soothing breast) is idealized.
- The bad object (e.g., a frustrating breast) is vilified and expelled through projection.

This helps the infant manage ambivalence and fear by not having to hold contradictory feelings toward a single object.

Klein’s critical point here is that the act of splitting is not limited to external or internal objects alone. The ego itself also splits in order to manage this division. That is, one part of the ego aligns with the good object and idealized feelings (love, gratitude), while another aligns with the bad object and persecutory anxieties (hate, envy, aggression).

Thus: Split objects create a split ego. There is no such thing as a purely external division; it has intrapersonal consequences.

In pathological cases (e.g., schizoid or borderline functioning), these splits remain rigid, leading to fragmented self-experience, where the person cannot reconcile their own good and bad parts. Therapy aims to facilitate integration - bringing the split parts of ego and object back into a more coherent whole.

09/06/2025

According to Klein, around the 5th - 6th month of life, infants transition from a paranoid-schizoid stance - where objects are split into “all good” or “all bad” - into the depressive position, recognizing their primary object (e.g., the mother) as a whole person capable of both gratifying and frustrating the child.

In this depressive phase, the infant internalizes destructive fantasies directed toward the loved object. This is no longer a split-off part but a cohesive realization: “I both love and hate her.” That awareness brings forth intense guilt.

This emotional depth triggers intense guilt and a simultaneous, urgent impulse to repair the ‘damage’ done. Klein considered this reparation essential to psychological maturation. She emphasized it’s both “impossible to satisfy” - it’s not a one-time fix - and yet vital, thus weaving repair into the core of mental development.

31/05/2025

This quote comes from Winnicott’s psychoanalytic paper “Hate in the Counter-Transference,” in which he speaks candidly - especially for his time - about the emotional reality of mothers and therapists. He explores the idea that hate is a normal and even necessary part of caregiving, and that acknowledging this emotion is more honest and therapeutic than denying it.

By saying “the mother hates the baby from the word go,” Winnicott does not mean the mother consciously or globally dislikes her child. Rather, he’s naming the accumulated frustrations, resentments, and physical/emotional demands placed on a caregiver that often go unspoken.

He continues in the same essay to list reasons why a mother might “hate” her baby, such as:
• The baby is ruthless, takes without concern.
• The baby wakes the mother up repeatedly.
• The baby interferes with her s*x life.
• The baby requires constant attention and gives no thanks.
• The baby has no manners, and cannot reciprocate emotionally at first.

Being emotionally aware of one‘s own hate reduces its influence by not acting it out.

16/05/2025

Winnicott distinguishes between mere existence and “feeling real.” For him, existing biologically — eating, breathing, functioning — isn’t the same as having a felt, authentic sense of being. This “realness” isn’t about being dramatic or visible to others. It’s a quiet, internal truth: a deep sense of “I am myself” — stable, alive, and emotionally grounded.

Winnicott is pointing to the subjective experience of selfhood.
Some people move through life without really feeling connected to themselves — they act based on expectations, roles, or survival instincts. He would call this a false self structure: someone may appear fine outwardly, but inwardly, feel hollow or unreal.

To feel real is to experience your thoughts, emotions, and actions as truly yours — not forced, not performed, but authentic. It’s the difference between “I’m supposed to say this” and “this is genuinely how I feel.”

In therapy, helping someone “feel real” might involve creating a space where they’re not judged, not required to perform — where they can explore who they are underneath survival adaptations.

In life, people might find realness in play, art, nature, intimacy — any space where they are free to be without needing to be “useful” or pleasing.