Text
of talk to be given on December 6th 2012
W.
R. Bion and Reverie
I propose to structure the talk in the following way:
a) Start
with a description of reverie and the experience of it;
b) Give
some biographical information about Bion to give a context;
c) If
we are feeling safe enough, share two minutes of not speaking as a group;
d) Finish
with a discussion about how reverie can be used in therapy.
There are two types of experience, according to Bion:
that of the pre-conceptual and the conceptual. These experiences may be thought
of roughly as pre-verbal and verbal and (largely) unconscious and conscious
states. It is suggested that they need to be linked, and if this linking does
not take place properly a sense of a fully integrated and contained self cannot
develop. The linking happens in reverie and other dream states.
I think that Marilyn Mathew
describes the experience of reverie very well when she talks about reverie
being like the unlatching of an internal window. She describes the experience
of looking outside through a window and meditatively allowing oneself to be
drawn into the view. There is the experience of being absorbed into the
distance and the sense of entering into a space deep inside oneself. One enters
into a dream-like state though fully conscious.
Though it’s a dreamy state
in wakefulness, it’s different to what we usually think of as day-dreams.
Daydreams are more like Freud’s idea of wish-fulfilment: there is a wish or
desire or conflict that needs to be resolved. This is done in fantasy, in
consciousness, for an example with an erotic daydream; of a fantasy of romance,
say, or a dream of a tropical island holiday on a grey winter’s day in England.
Reverie is more unbidden.
There’s a sense of going beyond oneself, and at the same time being drawn deep
within oneself.
In the context of therapy
time, Ogden has described reverie as being like ruminations. They are
reflective thoughts that are going on in the background that one keeps coming
back to. Often as therapists I think we worry about these thoughts and can see
them as distractions.
Ogden gives the example of
feeling that he was distracted in a session with a patient. Where he works
there is an office car park. Without permission a couple have set up a hand car
wash business in the car park. They have a loud industrial vacuum cleaner which
they use for cleaning the interiors of the cars. In the session Ogden is drawn
into the disturbing noise of the vacuum. His patient does not appear to notice.
He starts thinking about how abrasive and difficult the couple doing the car
cleaning are to deal with. He is going to have to deal with the City Hall in
making a complaint about noise nuisance and planning rules infringement along
with legal procedures to get them off the car park. When he ‘comes round’ from
his absorption in these thoughts and the noise of the vacuum, he feels bad
about himself and is very anxious. His patient doesn’t appear to have noticed
anything and has continued to talk. Though his patient has described symptoms
that are uncomfortable for her, the way she presents herself is very ‘up.’ She
is a successful lawyer, married and leads an active social life.
Over the next few weeks
Ogden finds himself coming back to his reverie and his reflections and
ruminations on it. He wonders about whether he was distracted and failed to be
able to concentrate on what his client was saying because of his own concerns
or whether there was something else. As the sessions go on his client slowly
reveals in the sessions that she feels empty and meaningless as a person and is
very frightened by the void she experiences herself as being. Ogden describes
his work with his patient in some detail but essentially in terms of the
reverie there’s an association that Ogden made between the void of the vacuum
cleaner that he was drawn into and his client experiencing herself as a
frightening void. In the moment of the therapy session Ogden was able to make
the link between inside and outside states and pre-conceptual and conceptual
experiences when it seems that his patient was unable to do that in that
moment.
A reverie example from
literature is set in a short story by the writer Haruki Murakami. The story is
somewhat surreal though apparently based in ordinary reality. A young
successful couple newly married find themselves hungry one evening with nothing
to eat in the fridge. They live in Tokyo and could simply go to a 24 hour
supermarket. However, that isn’t going to be enough: it won’t satisfy them.
They decide that they have to hold up an all-night bakery and steal the bread.
While they are having this
conversation, the male protagonist of the story falls into a reverie. He
experiences himself as bobbing in a little boat on a vast ocean. The water is
opaque. Then it clears to reveal a great depth and a large volcano in the sea
bed. This revelation as Murakami calls it is over in a matter of seconds and
his wife doesn’t appear to notice.
As an interpretation I might
say that the protagonist thinks that he knows himself and his wife and that
they are safe and secure in ordinary life. However the linking of his internal
and external states reveals something else to him – the fragility of life and
how he can know someone else or not and himself.
I would say that reveries
can be experienced as everyday, as with Ogden’s distraction by the vacuum
cleaner, or as a significant linking and structural change, what might be
termed a ‘reverie moment’ such as with the revelation Murakami’s character
experiences.
Biography
and development of the idea of reverie
Bion was born in India in
1897. He came to England aged 8, to go to school here, and lived most of his
life in England. For the last 10 years of his life he lived in California. In
1979 he returned and died within a couple of months of his return, aged 82.
He left school at 18 and
went straight into the first world war as a tank commander. He was awarded a
DSO for a particular action. He described the experience of war as highly
traumatic and felt that there was a moment when he died existentially.
After the war he read
history at Oxford University, then trained in medicine at University College
London. He thought he might train as a surgeon, then turned to psychiatry and
his interest in psychoanalysis. Between the wars he worked at the Tavistock
Institute and started to train as a psychoanalyst with John Rickman. This
training was interrupted by the second world war. He rejoined the army as a
psychiatrist. Initially he was involved with recruitment boards and selection.
Then later he worked with trauma. Initially this was about how to get
traumatised service people back to the frontline, and later re-integrated with
civilian life. He was in charge of what came to be known as the first Northfield
experiment at the Birmingham hospital. This was a forerunner of the therapeutic
communities movement. However, the first experiment was short-lived. The
patients responded well but the staff found the ‘leaderless’ approach too
difficult to handle and the project was abandoned. A year later Harold Bridger
set up the second experiment, which did continue.
Bion wrote a book called
‘Experience in Groups.’ After the war, though, he turned to individual work and
completed his psychoanalytic training with Melanie Klein.
In terms of developing
theory, Bion developed one of Klein’s key concepts: projective identification.
Projective identification was developed from Freud’s idea of projection and
transference. The basic idea is that very young infants need someone to
identify with as a way of dealing with their chaotic and split off mental
states which predominate in the infant experience, as Klein saw it. The person
identified with initially is usually the mother or the person doing the
mothering function. The infant experiences herself as the mother without
separation as a way of being able to split off the bad feelings that threaten
to overwhelm.
Bion acknowledged this
defensive position but said that this happens when projective identification is
excessive. When it is not excessive and experienced in a state of reverie
between mother and baby then this is a form of communication. It is a usual
form of communication in pre-conceptual experience. Through this communication
learning and development can take place. An inner psychological space is
developed, which Bion called a container.
The container is both a
structure and a containing process. Initially the containing space for a baby
is not developed. An identification with the containing space of another is
therefore needed for experience to be bearable. In this way a containing space
within the infant can develop. The containing space of the other is needed
less. The baby can learn to self-soothe, self-regulate emotion and develop more
independently. There is more of a sense of a self being contained, a sense of
being able to come home to oneself and to bring home needed resources.
There can also be the sense
of a persecutory container if the containing process has not functioned
properly in the early parenting experience. There needs to be a sense of being
able to go beyond this initial experience of the container in order to be able
to repair and heal. In reverie there is this sense of beyond. There’s a sense
of looking out into a distance which draws one into a very inner space.
Group Experience
Use of reverie
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