The Analyst's Reveries

Explorations in Bion's Enigmatic Concept

Fred Busch

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367134174
• eBook ISBN: 9780429649189
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

While the use of the analyst's own reveries in work with patients has increased in recent times, there has been little critical inquiry into its value, and the problems it may lead to. The Analyst's Reveries finds increasing veneration for the analyst's use of their reveries, while revealing important differences amongst post-Bionians in how reverie is defined and used clinically. Fred Busch ponders if it has been fully recognized that some post-Bionions suggest a new, radical paradigm for what is curative in psychoanalysis.

After searching for the roots of the analyst's use of reverie in Bion's work and questioning whether in this regard Bion was a Bionian, Busch carefully examines the work of some post-Bionians and finds both convincing ways to think about the usefulness and limitations of the analyst's use of reverie. He explores questions including:

• From what part of the mind does a reverie emerge?
• How does its provenance inform its transformative possibilities?
• Do we over-generalize in conceptualizing what is unrepresented, with the corresponding problem of false positives?
• Do dreams equal understanding and what about the generalizability of the co-created reverie?

Busch concludes that it is primarily through the analyst's own associations that the reverie's potential is revealed, which further helps the analyst distinguish it from many other possibilities, including the analyst's countertransference. He believes in the importance of converting reveries into verbal interpretations, a controversial point amongst post-Bionians. Busch ends with the difficult task of classifying the analyst's reveries based on their degree of representation.

The Analyst's Reveries will be of great interest to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists.

1

The beginning

In everything I’ve written to this point, I was pursuing an idea. This book is the result of an idea pursuing me. Let me explain.

It all began with a clinical puzzle, leading to a three-year immersion in the work of Bion and the post-Bionions¹ on the analyst’s reveries, while also examining my analytic practice to see how and if reveries emerged. The serendipitous event that started this journey occurred in the form of a discussion by Cláudio Eizirik of my keynote paper (Busch, 2015) at the meetings of the International Psychoanalytic Association. His discussion, which centered on a reverie he shared with his patient, at first baffled and then intrigued me. My first inclination was to dismiss its importance, but I found myself coming back to it again and again, leading me to re-think my initial reaction.² However, my fascination with how an analyst uses his reveries continued long after the meetings, and this book is the result.

Here is Eizrik’s example of how he used an unbidden reverie, the patient’s response to it, followed by the train of thoughts I had about it at the time.

It was a Monday session. The patient begins to tell me the weekend events, in which he had a quarrel with his parents, and felt distant from his wife and children. He proceeds to a detailed description of each event, and while I listened, in fact nothing came to my mind but boredom, and the feeling that once again the week was beginning with the monotony and the obsessive defenses that are one of his usual retreats. I have nothing to say, nothing to ask, nothing.

Then an image comes to my mind, and I am looking at it, and finding it amusing, apparently forgetting the patient who goes on in his discourse. I imagine two kids in a bathtub, both of them full of soap, in such a way that it is impossible for each of them to grab the other, or hold an arm or the head of the other, in short, there is an absolute impossibility of getting in touch. It seems to me that this describes what is going on in the session. And so, I ask the patient what he would think of a scene that had just occurred to me, and I describe it to him, and ask him whether this could also describe what was going on between the two of us.

After a silence, during which I was afraid I had just said some nonsense, the patient begins to laugh and tells me that this was a common game among he and his brothers in their childhood, nicknamed ‘you cannot catch me’. And this opened the way to talk about his defensive maneuvers against a more fluid communication, and to understand that change is never easy, and that we tend to cling to what’s familiar to us, what we know about ourselves and our world.

My immediate reaction to hearing Cláudio’s reverie was YIKES! This is way out of the patient’s neighborhood,³ and I hope he doesn’t share it with the patient. But he does, and the whole atmosphere in the session changed. How to understand this? Before attempting an answer, let me back up a bit.

If I were capable of creating such an empathic image would I have said it? My first response was probably not! Why? As with Cláudio I see the boredom he felt in the session as a result of the patient’s defensive enactment in language action⁴ to dampen down any excitement in the room. Thus, if I could have the same image as Cláudio, I would try to contain it, and associate to how this image fits with my feelings of boredom in the session. It would not be a big jump to see how boredom could come up as a defense against this image, which could be considered a compromise formation…i.e., nobody is grabbing anything in this exciting bathtub we are in together. We can then see the detailed, monotonous description of familiar weekend quarrels and distance as a defense against the wish to grab or be grabbed in the analytic bathtub. So, my first thought was that I would deal with the defense.

That was where my thoughts stopped after my initial reading of Cláudio’s example. In fact, though, the more I thought about it, what upon first impression seemed like two different ways of working, struck me as having several similarities. That is each of us, in our own way, was trying to bring derivatives of the unconscious into the preconscious. My method was based upon my inclination to analyze the defenses against awareness so that the patient would feel safer to allow in the unconscious derivatives. Cláudio’s method is a variant of what some have called, “tickling” the unconscious derivative in the preconscious, thus not diving past what the patient is capable of understanding. In short, we are both concerned with bringing unconscious derivatives to the preconscious. It is my impression Eizerik understood something at the preconscious/unconscious border that led to his reverie, without his (Eizirik) awareness of the source. We can see in the patient’s animated response, and further associations, that Eizerik’s comment touched on something that was on the border of the patient’s preconscious/unconscious. If it was deeper in the unconscious we assume it would be unavailable to the patient for an affective change (i.e., too threatening) or further associations.

Bucci’s (2001) concept of subsymbolic⁵ thinking helps us understand how Eizirik came to his understanding.

The analyst who responds based on his subsymbolic computation, without as yet formulating this in symbolic terms, is nevertheless working with systematic knowledge—subsymbolic “knowing”—not in some magical or primitive mode. There are bases for his inferences that may eventually be identified, although he may not do this in the immediacy of the interaction.

(p. 66)

Inspired and intrigued by Eizirik’s example, I began to read further into what to that point had been a vague concept in my mind (i.e., the analyst’s reveries). In my early reading of the Bionian literature I began to feel like a Monsieur Jourdain from an adaptation of Molière’s The Bourgeois Gentleman by Timothy Mooney, who discovered that he has “been speaking prose all my life, and didn’t even know it!” That is, I realized I’d been having what some would consider reveries for many years, but classified them under the broader definition of associations or countertransference musings. As I delved further into the topic, the importance of distinguishing between these different forms of the analyst’s knowing became clearer to me.

Problems in re-thinking a concept

It isn’t easy to examine a psychoanalytic concept like the analyst’s reveries that has, for many, become an essential component in understanding all our patients, but especially those with early experiences that seem to have been only weakly represented. Like many developments in psychoanalysis, once a concept has shown to be of clinical value, the emphasis becomes one of discovering its utility, and critical inquiry seems to stop. As this happens what gets set aside are significant differences in what the concept means, and how it might best be used clinically. Further, the recent history of psychoanalysis is characterized by a valuable clinical idea soon becoming a separate school, followed by the dismissal of previous ideas of what psychoanalysis is. In my own psychoanalytic lifetime I have seen this with the Kohutians; Relationalists, Interpersonalists; and more recently some of the post-Bionians. As Ferro (Ferro and Nicoli, 2017), referring to Freud’s work, recently said: “As far as its clinical use today is concerned it is useless: reading something from Freud is never going to be helpful in the clinical situation” (p. 47).

As I turned my attention to the literature on the analyst’s reveries I realized, as Grotstein (Grotstein, 2009) noted, “Of all Bion’s new ideas, that of ‘reverie’ seems to be acquiring the most cachet as an instrument of technique” (p. 69). Even as this was happening, I realized that, as far as I could tell, there hadn’t been an extended inquiry into the concept. This seemed long overdue, and essential, as the use of reverie is presented by some of the leading post-Bionian thinkers as nothing less than an entirely new basis for thinking about the methods and goals of treatment. As recently stated by Ferro (Ferro and Nicoli, 2017) we “have to defend ourselves from what we already know: all that is known should not interest us anymore” (p. 2).

In fact, given what seems like an explosion of interest in reverie over the last decade, I think Grotstein was modest in his claim. While for many years I only cautiously accepted reverie’s usefulness, I have come to believe that it has the potential to be an important tool available to psychoanalysts in understanding what, to a certain point in treatment, has been ineffable. Yet, in using any tool there must be guidelines for the best results. Trying to use an axe to open a jar may accomplish its goal, but it can also lead to unforeseen consequences. In my travels through reverie I found many inconsistencies in how reveries were defined, and how the term is used in the clinical setting. Ferro (Ferro and Nicoli, 2017) captured this same phenomenon when he pointed out how reverie has

spread like wildfire across all conceptualizations of psychoanalysis, so it is one of those umbrella concepts that after a while could mean everything and its opposite, sort of like the term “projective identification”, so we can’t understand each other.

(p. 73)

The answer to basic questions like what a reverie consists of, in what part of the analyst’s mind does a reverie form, is it necessary to translate reveries into words, remain elusive. I have attempted to point out the various answers to these questions by post-Bionian analysts, while also formulating some way of how to think about these questions.

The analyst’s reveries, as a concept, is not alone in its multiple meanings. Since the very beginning of my clinical inquiries into psychoanalytic concepts (Busch, 1968) what seemed like a well-defined concept was often rife with inconsistencies and multiple ways of understanding (e.g., resistances, working through, countertransference, etc.). While others may despair over such a finding, for someone who likes mysteries, it has most often proven the beginning of an intriguing journey. I think everything I’ve ever written has something of this quality. In an interview the actor Daniel Day-Lewis, known for his absorption in the roles he plays (e.g., in preparation for playing an enigmatic dress designer in the movie The Perfect Thread, he apprenticed under the costume designer for New York City Ballet), described the allure as “discovering something that seems beyond reach, sometimes impossibly beyond reach, that pulls you forward into its orbit somehow.”⁶ Learning and thinking about the analyst’s reveries had something of this quality.

Like any journey into a mystery, though, it is also filled with frustration, especially when the writings of those who subscribe to the importance of a concept sometimes obscure differences to show they are on the same team. It was interesting, then, while writing this essay I came across a comment by the late Oliver Sachs, who said, “Writing is a bulwark against chaos. I have to write to come to terms with experience”.⁷ While I would probably use the word “confusion” rather than chaos, I think Sachs captured something primal in the experience of honestly immersing oneself in a psychoanalytic concept. This is how I felt in trying to understand the Bionian concept of reverie. I read about it, heard people talk about it in discussions and presentations of clinical material, and even thought I used it in my own work. Yet what it meant remained elusive. Some might say it is the nature of the term that leads it to remain elusive, however I believe that for us to evaluate the worth of a concept, let alone talk and argue with each other about it, we need to have a certain reliability⁸ in how we define a concept. Psychoanalysis has been especially adept at avoiding this principle leading us, at times, to have discussions that come close to a virtual Tower of Babel.

An interesting question was posed by some when reading an early summary of this book…i.e., what happens when a psychoanalyst from one theoretical perspective is trying to immerse himself and discuss a concept from another tradition? Does this work? Can it be constructive?⁹ Ferro’s (2015) criticism of attempts to understand his work from a Freudian perspective, believing the models were not comparable, is a typical reaction. Ogden (2011) offers a different perspective in his discussion of a paper by Susan Isaacs.

The important thing is what one is able to do with the ideas Isaacs makes explicit in combination with the ideas that her language suggests…In addition, and probably more important, I have a mind of my own, and that allows me to see in her work a good deal that she did not see. The same is true for you the reader, in reading Isaacs and in reading what I write.

(p. 4)

Ogden’s need to defend his understanding of Isaacs speaks to a larger issue in psychoanalysis of our tendency to dismiss critics from outside our circle, and thus lose whatever contribution they might make to our understanding.

A further problem in discussing a concept like rever...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• 1. The beginning
• 2. Three definitions
• 3. Bion’s definition of reverie: A brief review
• 4. Was Bion a Bionian?
• 5. Three post-Bionians
• 6. Further conceptual problems in the use of reverie
• 7. Questions about reverie as co-constructed
• 8. Conceptualizing an enigma
• References
• Index