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This article presents three approaches to the understanding and use of reverie. My response to this article is an attempt to inquire into some current Jungian perspectives on reverie and to offer my own clinical perspective, which includes my auditory and structural orientation towards reverie as a classically trained musician.
Reverie is a process between two persons, not only a state of mind. Busch states that reverie as process can only be understood over a period of time, not in a single analytical session. However, current Bionians such as Elias and Elizabeth de Rochas Barros and Antonio Ferro have tried to understand reverie within a single analytical session. Busch explores reverie through the ideas of Barros, Ogden, and Ferro. For Ogden, reverie includes a wide variety of psychic states while the Barros insist that reverie must be transformed into something that may be symbolized. For Ferro and Ogden, the capacity to have a reverie is transformative in itself. This is also my clinical experience and it is congruent with an understanding that one goal of analytic process is to increase a conscious capacity for imagination and for relational dynamics. We move through the process of reverie from unconscious isolation to a capacity for conscious relational reflection. It is an experience of expansion. Mark Winborn points out that participation mystique, as articulated by Jung, implies a blurring of subject and object and also points to an analytic ‘third’ that arises in the field between analyst and analysand (Winborn 2014, pp. 71-72).
Reverie as process is defined by the emergence of some form of image plus affect. Reverie appears to lie somewhere on the border between image and thought. Both the Barros and Ferro suggest that an affectively charged image comes to an analyst's mind as a way of capturing unmetabolized affect from the analysand. In Bionian language, beta elements are potentially transformed into alpha function through the apprehension and mediation