Reverie
Reverie, in Bion’s framework, describes a receptive state of mind that allows one to receive another person’s unprocessed emotional experience, hold it in unconscious psychological work, and transform it into thinkable form. It is the capacity for “waking dreaming” — a state of open, non-grasping attention that functions as a container for projections that cannot yet be thought by the person who brings them. For the mother, reverie is the capacity to perceive what is happening for the infant and to metabolize the infant’s terror, confusion, or need into something the infant can tolerate. For the analyst, reverie is the portal to the unconscious — the receptive state that makes containment possible.
Bion’s concept of reverie bridges the psychoanalytic tradition to contemplative practice. The receptive, dreaming attention that characterizes reverie resembles the open awareness of zazen and the non-grasping presence of centering prayer. It is the capacity to be-with rather than do-to, to receive rather than extract, to allow experience to resonate without immediately acting on it.
Maternal Reverie and Containment
Central to containment theory is Bion’s concept of maternal reverie:
“The child has not yet been able to put his experience into thoughts for himself, and has therefore used the mother’s thinking ability to make his experience more palatable. Bion believed that through the mother’s presence and reverie (her ability to perceive what is going on for the child), she can take in the child’s experience, use her mental capacity to digest the intolerable experience, and give it back to the child in a form that he can now tolerate.”
The process involves several movements:
- The infant experiences raw, unprocessed emotional states — beta elements — that cannot yet be thought or felt as feelings
- The infant projects these beta elements through projective identification
- The mother receives these projections in a state of reverie — relaxed, receptive, loving attentiveness
- The mother’s alpha function transforms the beta elements into alpha elements: thinkable, dreamable, storable psychic material
- The experience is returned to the infant in a detoxified, manageable form
This is not a passive process. The mother who contains does not simply absorb the infant’s projections — she metabolizes them, transforms them, and returns them in a form the infant can use. The infant re-introjects not the raw terror it projected but the terror-made-bearable, the anxiety-given-form.
Reverie as Waking Dreaming
Thomas Ogden describes reverie as “waking dreaming” — the analyst’s portal to the unconscious. When you read Ogden, “you wake up. You cannot stop thinking about your patients and yourself in surprising ways.” Reverie is not daydreaming in the ordinary sense; it is a state of heightened unconscious receptivity that allows the analyst to perceive what is happening in the analytic field without the interference of conscious theory or defensive structure.
Bion seems to conceive of dreaming as an ever-present invisible filter that overlays much of mental life, including perception and attention itself, allowing the subject to remain awake by day and asleep by night. The capacity for reverie is the capacity to maintain this dreaming state while awake — to let the unconscious work without being overwhelmed by it.
The Container/Contained Model
The container/contained model describes the structural relationship between reverie and projection:
The Container (♀) — The mother’s or analyst’s mind in a state of reverie. Receptive, dreaming attention. The capacity to receive and transform projected experience.
The Contained (♂) — The infant’s or patient’s raw, unprocessed experience. Beta elements — sensory, emotional data that cannot yet be thought. Projected through projective identification.
Transformation — Through alpha function, the container transforms beta elements into alpha elements. Alpha elements can be stored, dreamed, thought about. The contained is returned in a form the infant can integrate.
When the container fails — when the mother cannot receive and metabolize the projected experience — the infant re-introjects the projection unchanged but now amplified by a specific additional terror: the terror that there is no container, that the experience cannot be borne. Bion called this the experience of “nameless dread” — a dread that has no shape, no limit, and therefore no possible resolution.
Reverie and Dreaming
Bion’s understanding of dreaming as central to growth and his emphasis on the analytic relationship as a “waking dream” have had profound impact on contemporary psychoanalytic technique. The patient who is unable to think or dream is haunted by bizarre, concretized “thoughts without a thinker.” The analyst must work to restore the patient’s alpha function and capacity for symbolic thinking, using their own reverie as a containing, detoxifying presence.
The clinical application is direct. The analyst’s reverie — the fleeting thoughts, bodily sensations, and daydreams that arise during the session — is not noise to be filtered out but data to be attended to. These reveries are the analyst’s unconscious perceiving what the patient cannot yet think. The task is to attend to them, to allow them to resonate and find their meaning, and to use them in the service of interpretation.
Reverie and Negative Capability
Bion’s concept of approaching analytic sessions “without memory or desire” connects to Keats’s negative capability — the capacity to remain in uncertainty without irritable reaching after fact or reason. This receptive, open state is essential for reverie. The analyst who approaches each session with a fixed theory, a desire for particular outcomes, or a memory of what happened last time cannot be in reverie. The analytic stance requires evacuation of these defensive structures — not amnesia or indifference, but a receptive openness that allows the session to reveal itself.
This connects Bion’s late work to mystical traditions and to what the apophatic tradition calls via negativa — the path of negation that clears away all that God is not in order to encounter what cannot be named. The analyst who evacuates memory and desire is practicing a form of negative capability that approaches the contemplative.
Contemporary Applications
Reverie bridges the psychoanalytic tradition to contemplative practice in several ways:
Connection to Zazen — The receptive attention of zazen, the capacity to sit with experience without grasping or rejecting, is the meditative analogue of reverie. Both practices cultivate the capacity to be present to what is without immediately acting on it.
Connection to Centering Prayer — The open, non-grasping awareness of centering prayer resembles the receptive state of reverie. Both involve surrendering the effort to control or direct experience and allowing it to unfold.
Connection to the Contemplative Tradition — Reverie is a form of contemplative attention. The capacity to receive, to hold, to transform — these are contemplative capacities that the psychoanalytic tradition has articulated in clinical language.
Connections
Wilfred Bion — The originator of the concept; all development of the idea flows from his foundational clinical observations.
Thomas Ogden — Ogden’s readings of Bion are the most clinically useful and accessible; he developed the concept of reverie as waking dreaming.
Containment — Reverie is the state of mind that makes containment possible; the two concepts are inseparable.
Projective Identification — Reverie is how projective identification is received and transformed; the two concepts describe opposite ends of the same process.
Object Relations Theory — The tradition in which the concept was developed and remains most influential.
Zazen — The meditative practice that cultivates a similar receptive attention.
Centering Prayer — The contemplative practice that resembles the receptive state of reverie.
Apophatic Theology — The mystical tradition that shares the negative capability required for reverie.
Attention and Interpretation — Bion’s most philosophically ambitious work; develops the concept of approaching analysis without memory or desire.
Key Works
- Wilfred Bion, Learning from Experience (1962) — The central theoretical text; introduces the alpha/beta distinction and the containment model.
- Wilfred Bion, Attention and Interpretation (1970) — Develops the concept of evacuating memory and desire; the analytic stance of reverie.
- Thomas Ogden, The Primitive Edge of Experience (1989) — Development of the concept of reverie as waking dreaming.
- Thomas Ogden, Projective Identification and Psychotherapeutic Technique (1977) — Clinical application of reverie in the analytic setting.