Reverie
Bion's concept of maternal "reverie" as the capacity to sense (and make sense of) what is going on inside the infant has been an important element in post-Kleinian thought: "reverie is an act of faith in unconscious process...essential to alpha-function'" It is considered the equivalent of Stern's attunement, or Winnicott's maternal preoccupation.
In therapy, the analyst's use of "reverie" is an important tool in his/her response to the patient's material: "it is this capacity for playing with a patient's images that Bion encouraged".
Read more about this topic: Wilfred Bion
Famous quotes containing the word reverie:
“With a whirl of thought oppressed
I sink from reverie to rest.
An horrid vision seized my head,
I saw the graves give up their dead.”
—Jonathan Swift (1667–1745)
“Or else I thought her supernatural;
As though a sterner eye looked through her eye
On this foul world in its decline and fall,
On gangling stocks grown great, great stocks run dry,
Ancestral pearls all pitched into a sty,
Heroic reverie mocked by clown and knave....”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)