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Fred Busch, a Boston-based psychoanalyst, is one of the US analysts who has championed free association, Bionian reverie, and reflection as key psychoanalytic themes. Reverie plays relatively little part in the child psychotherapy literature (but see Hermon, 2016), so here I shall try to draw implications from Busch’s book for our discipline.
While, especially in adult psychoanalysis, there has been a proliferation of interest in reverie in recent times, it is far from clear what people are actually talking about when they refer to reverie. Busch makes a thrust at conceptual clarity by outlining some of the problems and differences in the way the word has been used.
Reverie, from the French word ‘rêve’ – ‘to dream’, in popular usage refers to a daydream-like state. But like many other words, such as ‘projection’, it has become a technical psychoanalytic term.
It is important to situate the emergence of a psychoanalytic reading of reverie in its historical context. Freud had barely written about countertransference publicly and he is generally – though somewhat incorrectly – understood to have viewed countertransference as an unwanted hindrance, and straightforwardly evidence of the need for further analysis for the analyst
(Holmes, 2014). But starting in the late 1940s, a ‘countertransference revolution’ was under way, which would eventually lead the notion to be viewed as an essential source of insight for understanding both projective processes and the uniqueness of the analytic relationship. Among the classic papers were those of Winnicott (1949), Heimann (1950), and Bion, who wrote rather startlingly: ‘mother’s love is expressed by reverie’ (Bion, 1962, pp. 35–36). In his typically elusive way, Bion didn’t explain what he meant. It seems likely that he chose the word reverie carefully, and he implies as such in the introduction to Learning from Experience. In doing so, Bion implied that mother’s alpha function involved a (day) dream-like state of mind in the mot