Concept
Reverie
In Bion's usage, the mother's calm, receptive state of mind that lets her take in what her infant projects into her, whether love or terror, and make sense of it through her own alpha function. It is the mother's side of container–contained, and analysts have taken it as a model for the analyst's open, dreamlike attention to the patient.
Development
1962
introduced by Wilfred Bion
In Learning from Experience (1962)
1997
developed by Thomas H. Ogden
Ogden extended Bion's maternal reverie into a clinical method. He treats the analyst's apparently stray thoughts, daydreams, feelings and bodily sensations during the session as a way into the analytic third, to be used in forming interpretations.
In Reverie and Interpretation: Sensing Something Human (1997);The Analytic Third: Working with Intersubjective Clinical Facts (1994)
Relations
- 1997 developed by Thomas H. Ogden
Ogden extended Bion's maternal reverie into a clinical method. He treats the analyst's apparently stray thoughts, daydreams, feelings and bodily sensations during the session as a way into the analytic third, to be used in forming interpretations.
- 2005 gave rise to Dreaming oneself into existence
The analyst's reverie is the main way in which they take part in dreaming the patient's undreamt dreams.
- 2007 gave rise to Talking-as-dreaming
Talking-as-dreaming carries the loose, associative quality of the analyst's reverie into the spoken exchange between analyst and patient.
Works
- 1962
Learning from Experience, published in 1962, is the first of the short theoretical books in which Bion tried to give psychoanalysis an instrument for thinking about thinking. Drawing on his work with psychotic patients and on Freud's account of the two principles of mental functioning, he asks how a person comes to learn from emotional experience, and why some cannot. To keep his terms free of the associations of existing theory, he introduces signs deliberately empty of meaning, chief among them alpha-function, and treats the personality as a set of functions and their factors. Alpha-function works on sense impressions and emotional experiences and turns them into alpha-elements, which can be stored, used in dream thoughts and in unconscious waking thought, and remembered. What is not so transformed remains as beta-elements: undigested facts felt as things in themselves rather than as thoughts, fit only to be evacuated by projective identification or discharged in action. Alpha-elements cohere into a contact barrier that both separates and joins conscious and unconscious, so that one can be awake or asleep, aware or unaware; where alpha-function fails, a screen of beta-elements takes its place, and the person cannot properly dream, and so can neither fall asleep nor fully wake. The function develops in the infant through the mother's capacity for reverie: she takes in the states the infant projects into her, such as a fear of dying, and returns them in a form it can bear, and the infant introjects the function along with them; when she cannot, what returns to the infant is nameless dread. Thinking begins when an expectation meets frustration: an infant who can bear the absence forms a thought of it, while one who cannot treats the absence as a bad object to be got rid of. Bion describes the links between objects as love, hate and knowledge (L, H and K), and makes K — the painful activity of getting to know something, as distinct from possessing knowledge about it — the link on which learning from experience depends; its negative, minus K, strips experience of meaning and is driven by envy. In the later chapters he discusses how the analyst abstracts models from clinical experience and recognises a selected fact that gives coherence to the scattered material of a session, and he abstracts the mother–infant model into the relation of container and contained, which his later books develop.
- 1994
The Analytic Third: Working with Intersubjective Clinical Facts
Through two clinical sequences, Ogden illustrates the analyst's effort to recognise, understand and put into words, for himself and for the patient, the moment-to-moment interplay of three subjectivities: the analyst's, the analysand's, and the experience the two create together, which he calls the analytic third. In the first sequence the analyst reaches this jointly created experience partly through what seem to be his own private reveries, states that can look like narcissistic self-absorption, distraction, compulsive rumination or daydreaming. In the second, the analyst's somatic delusion, together with the patient's sensory experiences and bodily fantasies, becomes the principal route by which he comes to understand the leading anxieties being generated between analyst and patient.
- 2005
This Art of Psychoanalysis: Dreaming Undreamt Dreams and Interrupted Cries
A collection of essays published in 2005 in Routledge's New Library of Psychoanalysis. Thomas Ogden asks why dreaming should be the mind's most important psychoanalytic activity, and proposes a new way of conceiving the part dreaming plays in human psychology. Building on Freud, Klein, Winnicott and Bion, he explores the idea that psychopathology manifests a breakdown in a person's capacity to dream their own experience, and examines how the analyst takes part psychologically in the patient's dreaming. Clinical accounts run through the book, which sets out to convey a humane way of being with patients, not only a set of techniques. Its chapters include the title essay on dreaming undreamt dreams and interrupted cries, a new reading of the origins of object-relations theory, "On Not Being Able to Dream", "What's True and Whose Idea Was It?", a reading of Bion, "On Holding and Containing, Being and Dreaming" and an essay on psychoanalytic writing.
- 2007
Ogden describes a form of waking dreaming for patients who cannot dream in the analytic session, whether through free association or otherwise. In what he calls talking-as-dreaming, analyst and patient engage in loosely structured conversation, often marked by primary-process thinking and apparent non sequiturs, about matters such as books, films, the origins of words, baseball, the taste of chocolate or the structure of light. Such talk may seem unanalytic, but it can allow the patient to begin dreaming experience that was previously undreamable; in an analysis that is a going concern, the talk moves unobtrusively into and out of talk about dreams. Two detailed clinical accounts are given: in one, a patient for the first time dreamed her own, and in a sense her father's, previously unthinkable experience; in the other, a patient who had felt invisible began to dream himself into existence. Ogden sets out three cautions: the difference between the analyst's and the patient's roles must remain continuously felt, the therapeutic aims must be kept firmly in mind, and the patient must dream himself into existence rather than be dreamt up by the analyst.
See also
Linked from
People
References
- Learning from Experience1962Evidence for a relation
- Reverie and Interpretation: Sensing Something Human1997Evidence for a relation
- The Analytic Third: Working with Intersubjective Clinical Facts1994Evidence for a relation
- This Art of Psychoanalysis: Dreaming Undreamt Dreams and Interrupted Cries2005Evidence for a relation
- On Talking-as-Dreaming2007Evidence for a relation