One Life Heals Another: Beginnings, Maturity, Outcomes of a Vocation

Abstract

Emily Dickinson” is aptly titled. We experience Ogden’s associations, feelings, and his evocation of experience in reading two poems. It is an important part of this book because he embodies his aliveness in a setting with these poets. He invites us into his internal setting as a reader and how he is coming to life in the reading room—an experience related to coming alive in the consulting room. In a previous work (see footnote 1), Ogden cited Stoppard’s elegant definition of poetry as a literary form that simultaneously expands meaning as it contracts language. In this chapter, Ogden embodies a parsimony of language as he illustrates his responsiveness to patients. This volume itself enacts so beautifully the feeling of coming alive in the consulting room, an effort to live and create in potential space. My internal, ongoing conversations with Thomas Ogden over the years were once again enormously deepened. I am grateful to him as a clinician, theoretician, and, as I wish to emphasize again, a revolutionary student of tradition. STEVEN COOPER (NEW YORK, NY)