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In “Raw Reveries, Polaroid Reveries” Pietrantonio offers the reader insights into the recognition and utilization of reverie in analysis. Working from a hybrid Jungian-Bionian perspective, reverie is an essential aspect of my analytic practice and is a focus in much of my writing (Winborn, 2014, 2017, 2018, 2019, , , 2023, 2024).
Reverie is opening to one's own internal stream of consciousness—to ideas, thoughts, feelings, sensations, memories, images, urges, and fantasies. Ogden (1997, p. 158) describes reverie as “an experience that takes the most mundane and yet most personal of shapes …. They are our ruminations, daydreams, fantasies, bodily sensations, fleeting perceptions, images emerging from states of half-sleep, tunes, and phrases that run through our minds, and so on.” Working from a different vantage point, Mathew (2005, p. 391) describes reverie as “both a process and a state of mind … it is reverie that extends psyche's vision beyond the door and windows of our minds into the cathedrals of our souls.” Often, the emergence of reverie does not initially appear to have a direct link to the surface content of material being discussed in the session, or to a silence permeating the room.
The term “reverie” was adopted by Wilfred Bion (1962/1983) to refer to a state of mind that the infant requires of the mother—a state of calm receptiveness to take in the infant's feelings and give them meaning. Through this making sense of, or meaning-making, the mother digests feelings “deposited” in her psyche by the infant through projective identification which are felt by the infant to be intolerable, such as anxiety or terror, and in need of containment. Working from a Jungian perspective, Cwik (2011) has coined the term “associative dreaming” to refer to a broad continuum of “reverential-like” states that occur in the analytic setting, including reverie.
As with many aspects of analytic work, there are often many ways to approach any given situation. Ogden (1997) emphasi