Embodied Reverie

Bachelard says that the ‘psychology of the alchemist is that of reveries trying to constitute themselves in experiments on the exterior world.’ In the context of research, these experiments are ways of dreaming the subject matter of one’s work with one’s ‘eyes wide shut.’

Romanyshyn, via Bachelard, constitutes embodied reverie as the foundational epistemological stance of depth-psychological research: an alchemical dreaming that takes place in and through material engagement with the world.

Romanyshyn, Robert D., The Wounded Researcher: Research with Soul in Mind, 2007thesis

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reverie is that state of mind which is open to the reception of any ‘objects’ from the loved object and is therefore capable of reception of the infant’s projective identifications whether they are felt by the infant to be good or bad. In short, reverie is a factor of the mother’s alpha-function.

Bion establishes the foundational somatic-relational definition of reverie as an affectively open, embodied receptivity constitutive of the mother’s alpha-function and, by extension, of all analytic containing.

Bion, Wilfred Ruprecht, Learning from Experience, 1962thesis

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the researcher’s mood and body belong to the body of his or her work and that his or her work is embodied. One’s work settles into one’s flesh and indeed is spun out of one’s flesh.

Romanyshyn argues that embodied reverie is not incidental to research but constitutive of it, as the researcher’s somatic states carry the unconscious intelligence of the work itself.

Romanyshyn, Robert D., The Wounded Researcher: Research with Soul in Mind, 2007thesis

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The analyst’s reverie experience constitutes an indispensable avenue to the understanding and interpretation of the transference-countertransference and yet is perhaps the dimension of the analyst’s experience that feels least worthy of scrutiny.

Ogden positions the analyst’s reverie — mundane, personal, bodily — as the primary intersubjective instrument for accessing the unconscious field shared between analyst and analysand.

Ogden, Thomas, Reverie and Interpretation, 1997thesis

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Reverie is the mood of the poetics of the research process, and, as such, it is a paradoxical way of knowing the world, whose mood is neither oneiric nor rational. In reverie, we are in that middle place between waking and dreaming.

Romanyshyn defines embodied reverie as an irreducibly intermediate mode of consciousness — a hermeneutical, symbolic stance that dissolves the literal density of the work and opens it to plural meaning.

Romanyshyn, Robert D., The Wounded Researcher: Research with Soul in Mind, 2007thesis

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The mood that helps to create this space is reverie… this mood of reverie is another way of thinking, which is analogous to what Jung describes as non-directed thinking. In non-directed thinking, ‘[w]e no longer compel our thoughts along a definite track, but let them float, sink or rise according to their specific gravity.’

Romanyshyn aligns embodied reverie with Jungian non-directed thinking, framing it as a deliberate methodological suspension of ego-control that enables the unconscious dimensions of research to surface.

Romanyshyn, Robert D., The Wounded Researcher: Research with Soul in Mind, 2007supporting

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reveries are a more passive form of letting go of the work… whereas reverie tends to challenge the personal complex that underpins the researcher’s unconscious relation to the work, these dialogues extend the range of the unconscious in the work.

Romanyshyn distinguishes reverie from active imagination as a more passive, involuntary somatic-imaginal release that nonetheless functions as a necessary counterpart to deliberate depth-psychological inquiry.

Romanyshyn, Robert D., The Wounded Researcher: Research with Soul in Mind, 2007supporting

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From the point of view of dreaming perception, an image is a place, an environment in which we find ourselves… This quasi-physical environment creates strong responses in the body, embodied states.

Bosnak theorizes embodied imagination as the somatic actualization of imaginal environments, arguing that quasi-physical dream-images generate real bodily states that constitute the medium of therapeutic and creative work.

Bosnak, Robert, Embodiment: Creative Imagination in Medicine, Art and Travel, 2007supporting

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The closer Berthe gets to the bull, the more her body becomes infused with its power. Like walking into a storm, the bull becomes a maelstrom of turbulence. The closer we get to an image-presence, the more it becomes an environment in which we find ourselves.

Bosnak demonstrates the somatic logic of embodied reverie: imaginal proximity to an image-presence produces genuine physiological states, collapsing the boundary between inner experience and external environment.

Bosnak, Robert, Embodiment: Creative Imagination in Medicine, Art and Travel, 2007supporting

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Through careful attention to details of the image environment, affective states, and physical sensations, the natural waking hypnagogic state can be artificially intensified, so the initially flimsy image ambience becomes increasingly dense, sometimes perceived as equally real, as while dreaming.

Bosnak describes the technical cultivation of embodied reverie through the waking hypnagogic state, in which deliberate somatic attention amplifies imaginal reality to the density of full dreaming consciousness.

Bosnak, Robert, Embodiment: Creative Imagination in Medicine, Art and Travel, 2007supporting

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reverie might be thought of as the outcome of the unconscious ‘understanding work’ that is an integral part of dreaming. Dreaming and reverie always involve an unconscious internal discourse between ‘the dreamer who dreams the dream and the dreamer who understands the dream.’

Ogden, following Grotstein, frames reverie as the surfacing of an unconscious self-interpreting process, linking embodied reverie to the analytic theory of dreaming as simultaneously generative and self-comprehending.

Ogden, Thomas, Reverie and Interpretation, 1997supporting

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Embodiment is about gaining, through the vehicle of awareness, the capacity to feel the ambient physical sensations of unfettered energy and aliveness as they pulse through our bodies. It is here that mind and body, thought and feeling, psyche and spirit, are held together, welded in an undifferentiated unity of experience.

Levine situates embodiment as the somatic ground from which reverie becomes possible, arguing that full presence to bodily sensation dissolves the mind-body split that ordinarily forecloses imaginal receptivity.

Levine, Peter A., In an Unspoken Voice: How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness, 2010supporting

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Thomas Ogden provides an excellent and moving description of his therapeutically efficacious use of seemingly distracting states, which, following Bion, he refers to as ‘reverie’… Ogden describes a non-judgmental response to what from the Theravada perspective might be described as ‘afflictive and unwholesome.’

Cooper situates Ogden’s embodied reverie within a cross-cultural framework, noting its structural homology with contemplative non-judgmental awareness, while marking its distinction from Theravada dualisms of wholesome and unwholesome states.

Cooper, Seiso Paul, Zen Insight, Psychoanalytic Action: Two Arrows Meeting, 2019supporting

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Embodied imagination portrays multiple worlds. Our embodied states mirror manifold substances: bulls, kami, bison, Uncle John, the neighbor’s car… a multiplicity of subjectivities is the norm, not the pathology.

Bosnak extends the concept of embodied reverie to challenge the unity of the subject, arguing that the somatic imaginal field harbors a polyphonic plurality of embodied presences rather than a single experiencing self.

Bosnak, Robert, Embodiment: Creative Imagination in Medicine, Art and Travel, 2007supporting

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Neither should we dismiss any reverie as simply our ‘own stuff,’ i.e., as a reflection of our own unresolved conflicts… An important event in the analyst’s life… is differently contextualized by the analyst’s experience with each patient, and as a result becomes a different ‘analytic object’ in each analysis.

Ogden cautions against the privatization of reverie, insisting that the analyst’s embodied experience is always co-constituted by the specific relational field with each patient rather than being merely personal residue.

Ogden, Thomas, Reverie and Interpretation, 1997aside

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the waking world is more sharp and crisp, she says, the world of dreaming more round and slow, as if the embodied inhabitants move through water, through a thicker medium.

Bosnak uses phenomenological testimony to mark the qualitatively distinct temporal and somatic texture of the hypnagogic state that constitutes the threshold of embodied reverie.

Bosnak, Robert, Embodiment: Creative Imagination in Medicine, Art and Travel, 2007aside

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The messenger in the form of revelatory image had arrived from the margins, passing through the threshold of the right brain while the left brain still clung to the linear content at center stage.

Romanyshyn illustrates the somatic and neurological displacement through which embodied reverie delivers its imaginal content — arriving unbidden through the body’s peripheral, non-directed intelligence.

Romanyshyn, Robert D., The Wounded Researcher: Research with Soul in Mind, 2007aside

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