On the day the gift of a copy of a book on the theology and practice of lament arrived from a good friend, I’d been reading Thomas Ogden, and also a review of one of his books. I was struck by his naming of the importance of mourning and of working healthily with “loss”. I reflected on my actions and the practices of writing, talking and reflecting at depth (and as honestly as possible) over many years – either individually, or in conversation. It’s felt like a work of “creation”, a work of relating at ever-deeper levels to interior realities. It’s ushered in a “new voice”; a more authentic way of being and acting.
Psychoanalyst “…[Thomas] Ogden focuses on the art of mourning what has been in order to free us up to new possibilities of living. He illustrates a series of psychological issues involved in discerning the living voices and music that characterizes the past and the struggle to find oneself fully in the present through thoughtful studies of essays and poems by [Jorge Luis] Borges and [Seamus] Heaney, followed-up with moving clinical vignettes. His central thesis is that “mourning is not simply a form of psychological work; it is a process centrally involving the experience of making something, creating something adequate to the experience of loss…. [Mourning represents] the individual’s effort to meet, to be equal to, to do justice to, the fullness and complexity of his or her relationship to what has been lost, and to the experience of loss itself” (pp. 117-8). As such, Ogden ponders how each participant in the analytic process engages in the on-going art of mourning. He also speaks of the creation of new voice through morning – “…no voice, no person, no aspect of one’s life can replace another. But there can be a sense that the new voice has somehow been there all along in the old ones…” (p. 152).
From this review of Ogden’s book Conversations at the Frontier of Dreaming. Publisher: Northvale NJ: Jason Aronson, 2001. Reviewed By: Lawrence Hedges, Fall 2001, pp. 49-51.
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