Reverie occupies a contested but generative position in the depth-psychological corpus, functioning simultaneously as a clinical instrument, an epistemological mode, and a threshold state between consciousness and the unconscious. The term's foundational technical weight derives from Bion, who in Learning from Experience (1962) defines reverie as a specific capacity of the mother's alpha-function: a state of mind open to the reception of the infant's projective identifications, suffused with love or hate. Ogden inherits and radically extends this formulation, arguing in Reverie and Interpretation (1997) that the analyst's reveries—however mundane or private in appearance—are unconscious intersubjective constructions jointly generated by analyst and analysand, constituting an indispensable avenue into the transference-countertransference. From within this Bionian-Ogdensian lineage, reverie is inseparable from the analytic third, from dreaming, and from the problem of symbolization. A distinct but complementary tradition appears in Romanyshyn's phenomenological-alchemical usage, drawing on Bachelard, where reverie names the liminal mood between waking and dreaming that enables imaginal research: a paradoxical, non-directed mode of knowing that renders a work symbolically porous to ancestral and unconscious influence. Cooper further situates Ogden's reverie against Zen non-dual attention, while Moore's contemplative register gestures toward analogous states of arrested attention. Across these positions, reverie consistently marks the site where ego-directed cognition yields to a more receptive, intersubjective, and symbolically generative mode of psychological life.
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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 provides the foundational technical definition: reverie is the mother's receptive psychic state that enables alpha-function by metabolizing the infant's projective identifications.
Bion, Wilfred Ruprecht, Learning from Experience, 1962thesis
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 establishes reverie as the analyst's primary—if undervalued—pathway into unconscious intersubjective experience within the analytic dyad.
Ogden, Thomas, Reverie and Interpretation, 1997thesis
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 argues against reducing the analyst's reveries to personal countertransference, insisting they are differentially contextualized by each patient as analytic objects.
Ogden, Thomas, Reverie and Interpretation, 1997thesis
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.
Romanyshyn, following Bachelard, theorizes reverie as the liminal epistemological mood of imaginal research, positioned between dream and waking rationality and enabling symbolic porosity in the work.
Romanyshyn, Robert D., The Wounded Researcher: Research with Soul in Mind, 2007thesis
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, frames reverie as the alchemist's mode of unconscious experimentation—a template for the researcher's non-directed engagement with subject matter.
Romanyshyn, Robert D., The Wounded Researcher: Research with Soul in Mind, 2007thesis
in the mood of reverie, the complex researcher stops thinking and gives himself or herself over to being thought. He or she follows the track of thinking into paths that he or she has not made.
Romanyshyn articulates reverie as a surrender of directed cognition, analogous to Jung's non-directed thinking, enabling the unconscious to lead the research process.
Romanyshyn, Robert D., The Wounded Researcher: Research with Soul in Mind, 2007supporting
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 differentiates reverie from active imagination: reverie is passive and unintentional, arising spontaneously to surface the researcher's personal complex, whereas transference dialogues actively extend unconscious engagement.
Romanyshyn, Robert D., The Wounded Researcher: Research with Soul in Mind, 2007supporting
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 links reverie structurally to dreaming, arguing both involve an unconscious dialectic of production and comprehension that contributes to psychological growth.
Ogden, Thomas, Reverie and Interpretation, 1997supporting
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 reads Ogden's reverie against Theravada categories, noting that Ogden's non-judgmental receptivity to seemingly distracting states parallels certain meditative stances toward mental phenomena.
Cooper, Seiso Paul, Zen Insight, Psychoanalytic Action: Two Arrows Meeting, 2019supporting
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 shift of attention from reverie back to the patient generates interpretive insight previously unavailable to conscious reflection.
Ogden, Thomas, This Art of Psychoanalysis: Dreaming Undreamt Dreams and Interrupted Cries, 2004supporting
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 philosophical source underlying Romanyshyn's imaginal-research appropriation of the concept.
Romanyshyn, Robert D., The Wounded Researcher: Research with Soul in Mind, 2007aside
I felt that in addition to the gratitude (mixed with doubt) that Mr. L was experiencing in connection with these events, there were less-acknowledged feelings of ambival
Within a clinical discussion of the analytic third, Ogden demonstrates the interpretive movement from analyst's inner states to understanding of the patient's emotional life, the broader context within which reverie operates.
Ogden, Thomas, The Analytic Third: Implications for Psychoanalytic Theory and Technique, 1994aside