On Being and Knowing: A Response to Thomas Ogden’s “Ontological” Framework

Inspired by recent shifts towards what has been termed an “ontological” approach to psychoanalysis (Ogden 2019), this presentation will consider the relationship between “knowing” and “being” in psychoanalytic work. Through a close reading of Bion and Winnicott it will argue that the inextricability of being and knowing is central to the psychoanalytic project, and that the contemporary focus on experience, as exemplified by Ogden, enacts a split between the two that makes it more difficult to attend to all that experience entails.

Hannah Wallerstein, PhD, FABP, is a psychologist and psychoanalyst in private practice in Ann Arbor, MI. She serves as faculty at the Michigan Psychoanalytic Institute, adjunct faculty at the Austen Riggs Center, clinical supervisor for the CCNY Doctoral program, and on the editorial board of The Psychoanalytic Quarterly. She has published on gender identity and transgender phenomena, psychosis and historical trauma, the function of hope in clinical work, and the collapse between biology and ontology in psychoanalytic thinking on the body.

Readings
Winnicott, Donald W. “Interpretation (1968).” In Psychoanalytic Explorations, 207-212. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989.
Wallerstein, Hannah W. “Some Concerns with the Concept of Experience: A response to Thomas Ogden’s ‘Ontological’ Model.” (2025). [Manuscript submitted for publication].

Register for access to readings and to reserve a seat and a box lunch.