You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
‘Reverie is not a mind vacuum. It is rather the gift of an hour which knows the plenitude of the soul’. Gaston Bachelard, 1971
In the clinical method it is our aspiration – in as candid a way as possible – to turn ourselves over to our thoughts, and this is the legacy of Freud. This so-called ground rule applies not only to the patient, but is also very much true of the analyst. Freud wrote, in 1912 ‘ … the doctor must put himself in a position to make use of everything he is told for the purposes of interpretation and of recognizing the concealed unconscious material … ’. Freud also made use of the now well-known metaphor of two unconscious minds, to illustrate the sensitivity in the meeting between two persons, the analyst and analysand: ‘he must turn his own unconscious like a receptive organ towards the transmitting unconscious of the patient. He must adjust himself to the patient as a telephone receiver is adjusted to the transmitting microphone.’ This inner receptiveness which may function as a sort of resonance to capture impulses and mental states, both within us and from the analysand, forms my understanding of that which these days is known as ‘reverie’. It makes up the first step before we can formulate assumptions about what we believe is taking place, and the point in time in which it can be done. It is only once we have personally experienced within us a feeling, or spontaneously gained access to an impulse or association, that we have a compass enabling us to propose a thought, to try out on the patient.
Fred Busch has now written a new book ‘The Analyst’s Reveries. Exploration in Bion’s Enigmatic Concept’ (Routledge, 2019) which inquires into the roots of reverie and makes a thorough review of different writers’ views on the use of reverie by psychoanalysts. Fred Busch, who is a training analyst at Boston’s Psychoanalytic Institute, has previously published around 70 articles and several books, one of the latter being ‘Creating a psychoanalytic mind’ (