Reverie

Reverie occupies a generative and contested position within the depth-psychological corpus, functioning simultaneously as a clinical instrument, an epistemological category, and a mode of being in the world. Bion’s foundational formulation in Learning from Experience (1962) establishes reverie as a factor of the mother’s alpha-function: that state of receptive openness through which the containing mind transforms the infant’s projective identifications into bearable psychic content. Ogden inherits and radically extends this framework, repositioning reverie as an intersubjective construction jointly generated by analyst and analysand — what he calls an ‘analytic third.’ For Ogden, reverie is not private noise to be filtered out but an indispensable avenue into the unconscious texture of the transference-countertransference. Romanyshyn, drawing on Bachelard, transposes the concept from the clinical dyad into the phenomenology of research, treating reverie as the governing mood of an imaginal epistemology: neither oneiric nor rational, it occupies the threshold between waking and dreaming where symbolic knowledge becomes possible. Bachelard’s influence recurs as a philosophical anchor, framing reverie as the psychology of the alchemist — dreaming experiments upon the exterior world. Cooper situates Ogden’s reverie in dialogue with Zen practice, noting structural parallels to non-judgmental awareness of internal states. Across these voices, the key tensions involve reverie’s passivity versus its interpretive yield, its personal provenance versus its intersubjective genesis, and its relationship to more intentional practices such as active imagination.

In the library 14 passages

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 reverie as the foundational maternal receptivity through which projective identifications are received and transformed by alpha-function, making it constitutive of the containing relationship.

Bion, Wilfred Ruprecht, Learning from Experience, 1962thesis

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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 argues that the analyst’s reverie, though mundane and personal in appearance, is an essential and undervalued pathway to understanding the intersubjective unconscious field of the analytic relationship.

Ogden, Thomas, Reverie and Interpretation, 1997thesis

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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.

Ogden cautions against dismissing reveries as purely personal material, insisting they are differently contextualized by each analytic relationship and thus function as distinct analytic objects.

Ogden, Thomas, Reverie and Interpretation, 1997supporting

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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, following Bachelard, designates reverie as the epistemological mood proper to imaginal research — a liminal, symbolically generative state that softens the rigid boundaries of a work and permits ancestral influences to enter.

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

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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’s reading of alchemy, Romanyshyn frames reverie as the psychic process by which unconscious imagery projects itself into outer experimental engagement, making it a model for depth-psychological research.

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

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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 reverie with Jung’s non-directed thinking, describing it as a mode of surrender in which the researcher is thought rather than thinking, creating the receptive space necessary for transference dialogues.

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, while the transference dialogues are a more active way of doing so. In addition, 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 by its involuntary, passive character, situating it as the spontaneous counterpart to intentional transference dialogues in imaginal research methodology.

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

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Dreaming and reverie always involve an unconscious internal discourse between ‘the dreamer who dreams the dream and the dreamer who understands the dream.’

Ogden, citing Grotstein, argues that reverie — like dreaming — contains an internal unconscious dialogue between the generative and the comprehending dimension of the psyche, giving it inherent interpretive depth.

Ogden, Thomas, Reverie and Interpretation, 1997supporting

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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 situates Ogden’s reverie in cross-traditional dialogue with Theravada Buddhist interiority, noting that reverie’s non-judgmental receptivity to seemingly afflictive states parallels meditative attitudes toward internal experience.

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

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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 return from reverie to the patient’s narrative produces a sharpened, transformed perception of the analysand’s material, demonstrating reverie’s interpretive yield in action.

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

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the constellation of ideas about the transference-countertransference that had evolved in the course of this period of analysis had lost most of the vitality that it once had held. These ideas had become for both the patient and for me stagnant formulae.

Ogden dramatizes the clinical failure that precedes productive reverie — the collapse of formulaic interpretive frameworks — establishing reverie as the renewal of genuine analytic contact when conceptual structures have become defenses.

Ogden, Thomas, Reverie and Interpretation, 1997supporting

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such is the nature of analytic work, especially analytic work in which one attempts to attend to the infinite complexity of the interplay of the unconscious life of the analysand and that of the analyst.

Ogden acknowledges the irreducible complexity of analytic work in which reverie operates, noting that any account of its operation necessarily leaves multiple threads unexamined.

Ogden, Thomas, Reverie and Interpretation, 1997aside

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Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Reverie, trans. Danille Russell (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), p. 65, his italics.

A bibliographic citation confirming Bachelard’s Poetics of Reverie as the primary philosophical source for Romanyshyn’s application of reverie to imaginal research methodology.

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

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Related terms