The Analyst’s Reveries: Explorations in Bion’s Enigmatic Concept. By Fred Busch. London/New York:  Routledge, 2019.  114 pp.

When the psychoanalyst is thinking about his clinical work, s/he employs terms such as countertransference, narcissism, representation, etc., which help the analyst understand what is occurring within the analytic process. Since these terms are useful, s/he is not too concerned about precision or the potential conceptual differences applied by analysts who are not part of the same theoretical circle. It may be the case, therefore, that analysts employ the same term to describe different situations without realizing it.

On the other hand, we know that in psychoanalysis, as in other areas of knowledge, it is not possible—or even desirable—to attain conceptual precision that might conceal the complexity of the facts. This is why the psychoanalyst, even if interested in the theory, may not bother to differentiate between concepts that serve as umbrella terms for phenomena that appear to be closely related.

This diversity manifests itself in the term reverie. It can be likened to a daydream, to imagination, fantasy, intuition, countertransference, formal regression, containment, empathy (Bolognini),1 regredience (Botella and Botella),2 or a counterdream (Meltzer),3 among other terms. Something links the clinical events that these terms are attempting to

name. When we choose one of these words, we intuit that there must be some kind of specificity that makes it useful within our clinical work.

This complexity is addressed in The Analyst’s Reveries, by Fred Busch, a prominent North American psychoanalyst and member of the Boston Psychoanalytic Society. He furnishes us with an in-depth study of the meaning and uses of the ter