Reverie
Where do we start as therapists? That was an important
question for Bion. He started with the therapeutic space at the beginning of
each session. He urged that therapists should put aside ‘memory and desire.’
The word he used was eschew, memory
and desire. Perhaps that starting place is with Bion’s notion of ‘reverie’.
Marilyn Mathew describes an experience of reverie as when
we look out of a window at a quiet moment and gaze at the view outside. Slowly
the vision changes. We are looking outside, yet suddenly we have the feeling of
being absorbed in our own gaze. We drop into ourselves. An internal window
opens from the external and we inhabit a place inside ourselves.
Wilfred R. Bion (1897-1979) was a British psychiatrist
and psychoanalyst. His initial work was with groups and early therapeutic
communities during and after the Second World War. During the 1950’s, he
completed his training as a psychoanalyst with Melanie Klein, and then focused
on individual work. Theoretical work started with the ideas of Klein,
particularly with development of her notion of ‘projective identification.’
This is the idea that young infants unconsciously phantasise about the mother’s
person before psychological separation takes place.
Bion theorised that the relationship with the mother
takes place in a state of being which he called ‘reverie.’ In this state, when
the mother is seeking to know what her baby is ‘thinking’ or experiencing, then
communication, relational development and learning is possible. Reverie can be
defined as a dream-like state in consciousness which allows a link with
unconsciousness. The mother can sense what the baby wants in a pre-verbal
sense, in a type of knowing that is not knowing in the adult language way of
understanding.
Reverie might be likened to current ideas around
‘mindfulness’ and mediation. There is also a link I think with Fonagy’s idea of
‘mentalisation’, the development of Bowlby’s idea that we develop working
models of the mind so that we can guess what is in the (otherwise
uncommunicated) minds of others.
My aim for the talk is to take an experiential approach
and use examples of reveries from my personal life as well as with working with
clients.
References
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by Marilyn Mathew Thursday, 13 August 2009
19:26
Where
do we start as therapists?
David Ward
See: davidwardtravelling.blogspot.co.uk
W.R.Bion Learning from Experience, Heinemann
Medical Books, London 1962
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