Yes, Thomas Ogden—like Christopher Bollas—was not a philosopher in the formal sense, but his psychoanalytic thought is deeply philosophical, especially in its existential, phenomenological, and literary dimensions.
Ogden rarely cites philosophers directly, but his work clearly reflects philosophical influences and resonances, often more through mood, method, and conceptual sensibility than through explicit engagement.
1. Phenomenology and the Intersubjective Field
Husserl and Merleau-Ponty (implicit influence)
• Ogden’s focus on lived experience, the field of subjectivity, and the co-creation of meaning in the analytic encounter closely aligns with phenomenological thought.
• His concept of the analytic third—the shared unconscious psychic space created between analyst and patient—echoes Merleau-Ponty’s idea of the chiasm, where self and other fold into one another.
In Ogden’s world, there is no isolated mind—the self emerges in relation, in a felt, embodied field of co-presence.
2. Bion and the Philosophy of Openness and Not-Knowing
Though not a philosopher, Wilfred Bion was a profound philosophical mind, and Ogden’s deepest influence is arguably Bion’s idea of “thinking” as a process of becoming.”
• Bion’s emphasis on “thoughts without a thinker”, negative capability, and tolerating not-knowing shaped Ogden’s view that analysis is a space of reverie, dream-thinking, and poetic emergence.
• Ogden takes Bion’s ideas and brings them into dialogue with existential uncertainty, language, and the unknowability of self and other.
This is where Ogden approaches Heideggerian ground—he treats language not as a tool, but as a house of being, a space of unfolding presence.
3. Winnicott and the Ontology of the “Potential Space”
Ogden is also deeply shaped by D.W. Winnicott, whose concepts of:
• the transitional space,
• playing and reality, and
• the creative use of the object
…all hover at the edge of ontological and ethical philosophy.
Ogden builds on this by treating the analytic encounter as:
• A space where reality is co-constructed,
• Where new meanings are born,
• And where both analyst and patient risk being changed.
This space is not epistemological (about knowledge), but ontological:
It’s about how people come into being through dialogue, silence, and presence.
4. Existential and Literary Philosophies
Implicit Influences:
• Heidegger (Being-in-the-world, language as disclosure)
• Levinas (the ethical and unknowable Other)
• Buber (I-Thou relation as the basis of genuine encounter)
• Sartre and Kierkegaard (existential responsibility and becoming)
Though Ogden doesn’t name them, you can feel their presence in the texture of his writing:
• The way he lingers in ambiguity
• The seriousness with which he treats psychic suffering as ontological disorientation
• The refusal to reduce symptoms to diagnostic labels, instead listening for what they say about being and not-being
5. A Literary Philosopher in Psychoanalytic Form
Ogden is not only philosophical—he’s literary:
• His writing is lyrical, metaphor-rich, and carefully paced.
• He draws on literature (especially Faulkner, Rilke, Beckett, Shakespeare) not as ornament, but as epistemological companions.
• In this way, he resembles a kind of poetic existentialist or psychoanalytic phenomenologist.
Summary: Was Ogden influenced by philosophy?
|
Dimension |
Influence |
|
Explicit |
Rare — he does not name philosophers often |
|
Implicit |
Strong — through Bion, Winnicott, existentialism, phenomenology, and literature |
|
Style |
Poetic, reflective, existential, phenomenological |
|
Focus |
Co-constructed reality, intersubjectivity, language as revelation, not description |
Ogden doesn’t do philosophy, but he lives it in the room, through language, silence, and presence.
He is perhaps less a theorist than a thinker of experience, in the tradition of Levinas, Merleau-Ponty, or Rilke.
Would you like to compare Ogden’s and Bollas’ approach to the object, the self, or the use of language?
