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The concept of the analyst's reveries has been widely used and emphasized by psychoanalytic scholars, not only within the neo-Bionian school, but also by analysts following other theoretical approaches, including many relationalists. Views and uses of the concept differ widely as various authors apply them to clinical experience. Fred Busch has decided to clarify the concept of reverie and how it is used by different authors, and to explore, in the process, what in it represents a new way of looking at the analyst's work. That task, indeed, seems an important undertaking, and Fred Busch, in this slim volume, carries it out brilliantly and masterfully.
As Busch explores the meanings of the term reverie in Bion's writings, he encounters what direct quotations from Bion reveal as a rather vague generalization of the mother's function in responding to the infant's part in their interaction, transforming the infant's projection of sense impressions into emotions. Bion uses the term beta elements for the raw sense impressions that, with the mother's emotional approach to the infant—be it love or hatred—are transformed into emotions or alpha elements that the infant can internalize as understanding of his own emotions, originally represented by his projected raw sense data or beta elements. The mother's function in transforming beta elements into full-fledged emotions constitutes what Bion calls the “alpha function,” a product of the mother's transformational capacity. Reverie is her capacity to perceive