Working with Stone, Working with Psyche: The Role of Reverie in the Process of Making Art and Working with Patients

My task tonight is to give you a sense of reverie at work, both in the making of art and in analytic work with patients. I know that most of you here tonight are clinicians, but some of you are not, and so I will try to talk about reverie without referring to psychoanalytic theory or using technical terms. The rest of the conference will do that. As you know, I am both a stone sculptor and a psychoanalyst, but tonight I am going to talk mainly about working with stone. For those of you who are clinicians, many of the things I say about the role of reverie in my stone work will immediately call up parallels in your minds to working with patients. And when I speak about reverie in analytic work I will do it as an analogy to working with stone. In this way I hope the similarities will become very clear.

I think it is obvious to all of us that a piece of stone and a person are very different indeed, and so I won't tend to stress the differences. By stressing the analogies, too, I hope that the process of making art will become more understandable for the clinicians among you. We look at works of art, at least I do, and say in