Maternal Reverie

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 provides the canonical definition of maternal reverie as the receptive, love-saturated component of the mother’s alpha-function, the mechanism by which the infant’s projective identifications are metabolized into thinkable experience.

Bion, Wilfred Ruprecht, Learning from Experience, 1962thesis

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Bion (1959) notes that the quality of internalizations are contingent on the presence and quality of maternal reverie. The psychoanalytic literature provides examples of an unfortunate overabundance of gaps in both presence and quality.

Cooper identifies maternal reverie as the developmental precondition for healthy internalization, its absence producing structural gaps that are the central concern of clinical psychoanalysis.

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

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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 transposes the maternal reverie concept into the analytic frame, arguing that the analyst’s reverie — homologous to the mother’s receptive state — is the indispensable, though undervalued, means of accessing the intersubjective transference-countertransference field.

Ogden, Thomas, Reverie and Interpretation, 1997thesis

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Ogden describes a non-judgmental response to what from the Theravada perspective might be described as ‘afflictive and unwholesome.’ Regarding reverie, Ogden notes: For me, an indispensable avenue in my effort to get a sense of my unconscious experience in and of the analytic third is the use of ‘reverie.’

Cooper draws a productive parallel between Ogden’s non-judgmental analytic reverie — derived from the maternal model — and the Zen cultivation of open, non-discriminating awareness, illuminating a structural homology between the two disciplines.

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

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As the infant receives the milk and deals with it by the alimentary system, so the mother provides it by the glandular system, yet milk has been known to fail and the failure has been attributed to emotional upsets.

Bion grounds maternal reverie within a psychosomatic matrix, arguing that the emotional register of the mother-infant relationship — its failures included — mirrors and co-determines the physiological dimensions of nourishment.

Bion, Wilfred Ruprecht, Learning from Experience, 1962supporting

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

Ogden theorizes analytic reverie as structurally analogous to dreaming, embedding it in an unconscious double-register of production and interpretation that mirrors the mother’s transformative reception of the infant’s communications.

Ogden, Thomas, Reverie and Interpretation, 1997supporting

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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, our distress regarding events in our current life … 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.’

Ogden resists the reduction of analytic reverie to mere countertransference noise, insisting on its intersubjectively co-constructed character and thus its diagnostic fidelity to the analytic relationship.

Ogden, Thomas, Reverie and Interpretation, 1997supporting

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If the mother cannot tolerate these projections the infant is reduced to continue projective identification carried out with increasing force and frequency. The increased force seems to denude the projection of its penumbra of meaning.

Bion delineates the catastrophic developmental consequences when maternal reverie fails — the mother’s intolerance of projections forces escalating projective identification that strips communications of meaning, undermining the infant’s nascent capacity for thought.

Bion, W.R., A Theory of Thinking, 1962supporting

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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 appropriates the reverie concept — distilled from its maternal-analytic origins — as the epistemological posture of imaginal research, positioning it as a liminal, receptive mode of knowing analogous to the mother’s open attunement.

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

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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.’

Drawing on Bachelard, Romanyshyn positions reverie as the alchemical and phenomenological counterpart to maternal receptivity, a mode through which unconscious material constitutes itself in relation to an external object of inquiry.

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

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The mood that helps to create this space is reverie, whose features … apply here. Reverie, then, is both a way of letting go of the work and the mood of the space of the transference dialogues.

Romanyshyn frames reverie as the enabling mood for transference dialogues in research, echoing — at a methodological distance — the maternal function of creating a receptive, holding space.

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

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As my attention shifted from this reverie back to Mr A, a particular aspect of what he had said recently about his childhood took on enhanced meaning for me.

Ogden illustrates clinically how the analyst’s reverie — itself a descendant of the maternal reverie concept — functions as a vehicle through which repressed or unspoken patient material becomes accessible to interpretive attention.

Ogden, Thomas, This Art of Psychoanalysis: Dreaming Undreamt Dreams and Interrupted Cries, 2004aside

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