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There are two different perspectives on reverie that are interconnected. The one is the dreaming during the waking state that is particularly active in the analytic relationship. The other is the Bionian perspective on reverie: the mother’s ability to dream the child’s sensorial impressions and emotions elaborates them when the child is not yet able to do it. Bion, in his way of conceiving reverie, tends to configure each of the child’s sensorial experiences as a possible source of anxiety. He makes the distinction between the sensorial impressions associated with satisfaction of desire and those associated with its frustration problematic.
Bion’s discourse on reverie can be integrated with Winnicott’s thinking. Introducing Winnicott’s thinking on the mother’s mirroring ability in Bion’s conception of reverie permits us to distinguish between two levels of reverie. The first one is the mother’s capacity to reflect the existence of her child while she takes care of him, transcribing it, in its essence, in her more complex and multifaceted way of being. With the transcription, the mother metaphorizes the spontaneous manifestations of the child’s sensorimotor states. This metaphorization of the child’s primary existence predisposes him to the capacity for metaphorical representation in a second moment. The second level of reverie is the mother’s capacity to repair her metaphorizing, mirroring function, which normally suffers from inevitable infractions, by dreaming, and so containing, the child’s fear of dying–every time infractions happen.
Analysts have not the mother’s ability of reverie that is a particular psychic state. Furthermore, they are dealing with a failure of maternal reverie in their patients’ experiences. In the analytic relationship reverie is created by both analyst and patient: through the analyst’s availability to be destabilized in his own desire, memory and comprehension by the emerging of what in his patient is alive (struggling to achieve a form) and through the patient possibility to make a free use of him.
A clinical experience illustrates this cooperation in creating reverie that involves both the parts of the analytic relationship.