The Primitive Edge of Experience

Reading this book left me feeling that I had come across one of those rare works which induce us to rethink, in an unaccustomed way, our ideas about mental functioning and the analytic process. Its gentle and unpretentious style leads you by the hand through an array of English and French analytic works which are less familiar to the American reader, such as Klein, Bion, Bollas, Bick, Meltzer, Fairbairn, Tustin and Winnicott, on to Anzieu, Green, McDougall, Chasseguet-Smirgel and, finally, Lacan. This is added to many American writers who are much more familiar. (Monique V. King The International Journal of Psychoanalysis)

In this magnificent book, Ogden illuminates the darkest recesses of the human psyche with his brilliant formulation of the autistic-contiguous position. He also provides refreshing new perspectives on the Oedipus complex and female psychology. With this impressive contribution, Thomas Ogden has come into his own as one of the most creative and original psychoanalytic thinkers of our time. (Glen Gabbard)

Thomas H. Ogden, M.D., is a graduate of Amherst College, the Yale School of Medicine, and the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute. He has served as an associate psychiatrist at the Tavistock Clinic, London, and is currently Co-director of the Center for the Advanced Study of the Psychoses, a member of the faculty of the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute, and a supervising and personal analyst at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California. He teaches, supervises, and maintains a private practice of psychoanalysis in San Francisco.