Marina Ferreira da Rosa Ribeiro
University of São Paulo, Psychology Institute, São Paulo Brazil
ABSTRACT
This article promotes a dialogue some of Bion’s concepts and those of post-Bionian psychoanalysts (Ogden, Ferro, Rocha Barros and Chuster), looking in particular at psychoanalytic intuition, reverie and the alpha function. How can we think about the connection between reverie and intuition? Could the analyst’s state of reverie have at its centre – before and beyond the sensuous, in the infra- and ultra-sensuous – the analyst’s capacity for intuition? The paper presents a disturbing experience of an analyst in her consulting room, looking at how the concepts work in the clinical material. The clinical material sustains the hypothesis that reverie is an evolution of psychoanalytic intuition, and that intuition occurs between caesuras, which is supported by Bion’s proposal of no memory, no desire, no prior understanding, that is, negative capacity.
I suggest that somebody here should, instead of writing a book called “The interpretation of Dreams”, write a book called “The interpretation of facts”, translating them into dream language – not just as a perverse exercise, but in order to get a two-way traffic.
(Bion 1977/2014, 262–263)
When a concept is cited by several authors and present in a significant number of texts, we can say that it was a successful way of naming a clinical phenomenon in a given moment in the history of psychoanalysis. Reverie seems to be one of these concepts of contemporary post-Bionian psychoanalysis that has long been establishing this unanticipated destiny.
Based on an understanding that psychoanalysis is a “pre-conception”1 in search of realization (Bion 1962), we can reflect that each written text is a possible realization at a given moment out of an intertextuality. Taking this into account, all we have is the experience, both in a session and in writing a psychoanalytic text; a mind producing effects on another mind, a text producing effects on other texts, containment and contained, reverie and the alpha function, a mental intercourse that promotes transformations and openings of new fields of inquiry.
This text proposes to present, approximate and dialogue with some concepts, namely, psychoanalytic intuition, reverie and alpha function, in the work of Bion and, also, in the texts of post-Bionian psychoanalysts. For this purpose, I start by presenting a disturbing experience of the analyst in the consulting room, and continue by carrying out a metaphorizing exercise of approximation of the concepts with the clinical material. These are concepts and theories that will later be compared with new clinical experiences in a movement of constant return, expansion and creation – a dialogue that is intended to be open and complex. The understanding is momentary, provisional and always escapes us, because in the exact moment that we understand and are capable of narrating an analytic experience, the experience itself is already gone, it already belongs to the past, even if it is recent; the transformation has already occurred, the narrative become saturated, the text already been written, coming alive again for a future reader.
The epigraph of this article is the inspiration for the reflection presented here. After all, what does Bion mean with interpretation of facts? Translating them into the language of dreams? I proceed with these inquiries, keeping in mind that Bion commented in several seminars and supervisions that he only asked his analysands questions in order to continually expand the field of investigation. The theoretical-clinical reflection presented below has the same intention: to expand the theoretical field being investigated, without resolute intentions.
Walking in a dead man’s shoes2
When meeting Antônio for the first time, without any prior knowledge about him, I am uncomfortably focused on his shoes and think: these are the shoes of a dead man, how can someone walk in the shoes of a dead man? I find myself having almost a hallucinatory experience – the shoes produce the effect of a magnetic field from which I do not manage to distract my eyes and thoughts: I see death and I am paralysed.
He starts to speak, I am divided, watching what is said and the intense feeling of death in which I am immersed, without understanding absolutely anything of what is happen- ing, being dragged by the disturbing experience.
At the end of our meeting, Antônio distantly and briefly reports the facts of his life that needed to be dreamt together, facts that were contained and condensed in the image of a dead man’s shoes, a pictorial representation by which I was suddenly abducted when I met him.
His only daughter had been born with several malformations, had gone through surgical interventions and had lived only a few years. Antônio came to me one year after the girl’s death, or after his own psychic near-death; he was walking in the shoes of a dead man, devitalized, a dead man who is still alive. His need for analysis manifested itself expressively, however, for other reasons: he was not able to find a place of financial and professional recognition. The profession – life – showed itself with an unparalleled brutality, and there he was, a man walking with death chained to his feet. And, in the same room, the analyst, attempting to dream the brutality of the facts of his life.
In the vignette presented, the disturbing image that emerges in the analyst’s mind – the shoes of a dead man – emerges from the state of reverie,3 a state of loving receptivity, of hospitality, an opening to be inhabited by the other. Reverie also implies an imaginative capacity of the analyst’s mind, a capacity to dream the brutality of reality: a daughter born with malformations who passed away after only a few years.
The receptivity of the reverie state appears to be, at first, a disorganizing state for the analyst. The analyst is abducted by the experience, completely adrift, pulled by the pictorial image4 that is similar to a magnetic field of sorts that exerts a force of attraction from which it is impossible to escape – the analyst can merely recognize it and observe how the session will unfold a posteriori. At this point, the analyst’s act of faith5 referred to by Bion (1970) is fundamental, so that some sense will emerge from this chaotic and disruptive state.
Bion did not seem to be concerned with conceptual differentiations, which are uncertain and imprecise. Let us say that psychoanalytic concepts and people should be allowed a certain imprecision. Any resemblance to the emanations of the unconscious? The unconscious presents itself through shadows, beams of darkness, blurry and imprecise images. Ogden (1997/2013, 157) states that he believes “we do well in psychoanalysis to allow words and ideas a certain slippage”. Exactitude and precision are illusions of the conscience and of rational thought; the analyst works with impressions, approximations, with shadows and dim lights. The light of theory should not overshadow the enigmas of clinical experience, but favour the analyst’s mental capacity to navigate through uncertain, imprecise and volatile emotions. About this Bion (1992a/2014, 210) writes:
I do in any case feel doubts about the value of a logical theory to represent the realizations of psychoanalysis. I think the “logical” theory and the “illogicalities” of the psychoanalytic experience should be permitted to coexist until the observed disharmony is resolved by “evolution”.
This text does not intend to elect one vertex of understanding at the cost of another, or to attempt to solve the illogicality of theories, but to promote an exercise of conceptual and clinical reflection that aims to purify the technical tools of the analysts, their theoretical matrixes, to use the expression of Figueiredo (2020).6 Ogden (2016, 5) writes that even when theories are absent from the conscious thoughts of the analyst, as they ought to be during a session, they constitute a matrix, a psychic context, a metaphorizing containment. The analyst’s theory is part of their own unconscious collection; it needs to be embodied and forgotten, just like the technical exercises of a musician.
Theories tune the analyst’s ability to observe, just as musicians tune their instruments. The analyst’s mind is their work instrument, which goes out of tune throughout the consultations, throughout what is lived in the office and also in one’s private life. The theoretical elucidation exercise would be one of the ways for the analyst to tune their instrument when not in session, and reflect about what happened in it using concepts in order to understand the encounter with the patient that already forms part of the past. In this manner, they put the theory and the concepts to work in preparation for tomorrow’s session, tuning their work instrument, their mind and their capacity for observation.
I think that the theoretical containment of the analyst is an exercise that is conducted as a form of preparation for a session that is yet to occur. It is, also, a way of repairing their own mind after the sessions of a working day, or of years of clinical exercise. Thus, theory can play a role of containment for the analyst’s mind, in constant turbulence generated in the consulting room by the disorganizing encounter of two personalities, as Bion (1979) wrote. Starting from this vertex of the theory’s function as a metaphorizing containment for the analyst, I will now reflect on the concept of reverie, starting from Bion and going beyond, referring also to the post-Bionian authors.
On reverie and alpha function in Bion and beyond
The experience of reverie is always a disorganizing element for an analyst, which one tends to discard, which one is often ashamed of, considering it as inability or technical flaw, as in the clinical situation that inspires this text. And, at the same time, it is the emotional compass for the analyst, if one has the condition and the psychic liberty to con- sider it, being that this is no easy task (Ogden 2013).
It is important that we have in mind that Ogden’s understanding of reverie described above is only one, among others, distinct from the original postulated by Bion in 1962. The term reverie gained more diverse and broad meanings in writings of post-Bionian psy- choanalysts such as Thomas Ogden, Antonino Ferro and, in Brazil, Elias and Elisabeth Rocha Barros, and Arnaldo Chuster, among others.7
I consider it a surprising phenomenon that an expression presented in a less evident way by its original author, almost en passant, gains diverse proportions in later texts. I believe this is due to its clinical relevance. The same occurred with the Kleinian concept of projective identification, which appeared discreetly in a text of 1946 “Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms”. Klein named this seminal text informally as her article about splits; unexpectedly, projective identification was, posteriorly, the Kleinian concept that generated countless resonances (Cintra and Ribeiro 2018). Considering that these are conjectures, what would have been, actually, the intention of these authors when naming these phenomena? It is impossible to say, but the expansion of the concepts in other psychoanalysts’ texts indicates that a concept’s destiny involves different understandings and apprehensions, as presented in the book Projective Identification: The Fate of a Concept (Spillius and O’Shaughnessy, 2012). The fact is that the concept of reverie has been making history in psychoanalysis, through different vertices of understanding, in the text of several psychoanalysts.
The connection I make here between the destination of the concept of projective identification and reverie also has other links, in addition to Bion (1962/2014, 303) himself:
The term reverie may be applied to almost any content. I wish to reserve it only for such content as is suffused with love or hate. Using it in this restricted sense reverie is that state of mind which is open to the reception of any “objects” from the loved object and is therefore capable of reception of the infant’s projective identifications whether they are felt by the infant to be good or bad. In short, reverie is a factor of the mother’s alpha-function.
This short paragraph in the book Learning from Experience (Bion 1962) is almost all we have about reverie in Bion’s work. In this brief articulation that the author makes, we have two other concepts – projective identification and alpha function – reverie being then an alpha function factor, and, going on via projective identification, we will follow these clues or marks in Bion’s text.
Along the same lines, Rocha Barros and Rocha Barros (2019a) consider that the concept of reverie can be understood as a step in the history of psychoanalysis that is followed by the study of the concept of projective identification. Projective identification marked an intersubjective understanding of the constitution of the subject, which, especially in the light of Bion’s work, was considered a primitive form of communication, and, in addition, supported the understanding of the complexity of the interaction between the analyst’s and analysand’s minds in the session, as developed in previous works (Cintra and Ribeiro 2018; Ribeiro 2020). In other words, there is always communication that happens unconsciously, a question that intrigued Freud (1915) when he wrote about communication between unconsciouses, reverie being a way to capture these pro- cesses, as understood in Bion’s dream theory, briefly presented below.
The term reverie appears for the first time in Bion’s works in 1959 when he writes that in psychotic patients we find no capacity for reverie (Sandler 2005). Bion (1962) refers to reverie in a passing way, as already mentioned, and linked to the mother–infant dyad and not directly to the analyst–analysand dyad. In a short note found in previously unseen annotations published in 2014,8 The Complete Works of W.R. Bion, he writes that thoughts are a nuisance and precede thinking, and that reverie is important to the analyst because it produces “thoughts”, that is, the thoughts that will be thought.
In the clinical situation presented above, the image/thought that the analyst was seeing the shoes of a dead man was something disturbing and disorganizing, and a posteriori of the session it was possible to reflect that the image represented and condensed the psychic suffering of the patient. The analyst’s capacity for reverie “fabricated” or, better, generated the thought/image, remembering that we first think by images.
Following this reference publication, The Complete Works of W.R. Bion (2014), we find a comment from the organizer André Green (2014) referring to the book Cogitations:
One of the most enriching parts of these Cogitations must surely be Bion’s conception of the dream work (355). We find here the germ of what the author was later to call the capacity for reverie. What this means is that the dream work constitutes only a small part of this type of activity as found in the dreamer – that this work is a continuous process which also goes on during daytime activity, but remains unobservable (other than in conscious fantasy) except through its lack in the psychotic. The capacity for reverie is merely the visible aspect of a largely unconscious form of thought.
Resuming, the image that arises from the analyst’s capacity for reverie is only the visible aspect of a widely unconscious way of thinking; in other words, it refers to the ana
lyst’s capacity to make the invisible experience visible, to make apprehensible the dream thinking of the vigil, a diuturnal function of the mind. The reverie is the grasping of the unlistenable and imperceptible of experience, something grasped by the psychoanalytic intuition and transformed by the alpha function into a form, a sensorial image, a reverie. This is the theoretical argument that I am constructing in this text.
The oneiric thoughts occur as much while awake as when dreaming during the night. Ferro (2003) expresses his understanding of Bion’s theory of dreams through the follow- ing analogy: during the day, we have a cameraman filming several scenes, captured through the continuous operation of alpha function. During the night we have a meta alpha function that is occupied with directing, organizing the scenes in an oneiric story- line, in a continuous work of metabolizing the emotional experiences. Ogden (2009), from his reading of Bion’s text, realizes that the vigil’s oneiric thoughts are like stars, always present, but only visible in the darkness of the night.
According to Ferro (2003), we have two ways of grasping oneiric thought while awake: through the capacity for reverie and through a visual flash. For this author the pictogram is a visual fantasy that syncretizes what is being experienced in the session. The visual flash9 happens when the pictogram is projected to the exterior, outside of the mind, and thus it is “seen” almost in a hallucinatory manner.
Figueiredo (2020) understands reverie as a state of receptivity of the analyst’s mind. The author follows Bion’s description of reverie as: “that state of mind which is open to the reception of any ‘objects’ from the loved object” (Bion 1962, 303). Figueiredo (2020, 1996) also makes an interesting connection by bringing together the Freudian concept of constructions in analysis (1937) and Bion’s concept of reverie in a text from 1996, that is, before the discussion about reverie became significant for modern psychoanalysis. The author writes: “What responds to the listening of the unhearable and to the vision of the invisible is the ‘phenomenalizing’ speech” (Figueiredo 1996, 85, translator’s translation).
In addition, Figueiredo (2020) highlights Freud’s (1937, 268) analogy at the end of Constructions in Analysis: “But none the less I have not been able to resist the seduction of an analogy. The delusions of patients appear to me to be the equivalents of the construc- tions which we build up in the course of analytic treatment.” In other words, in one of his final texts, Freud wrote about the hallucinatory aspect of the constructions of the analyst.
Civitarese (2016b, 298) has also made a comparison between reverie and the near-hal- lucinatory response of the patient to the construction of the analyst, described by Freud (1937) in the same text. In other words, Freud observed that something of the near-hal- lucinatory experience manifests itself in the session, be it in the construction of the analyst, or be it in the response of the patient to this construction. Along the same lines but through a different approach, Bion writes (1967a/2014, 200):
The proper state for intuiting psychoanalytic realizations ... can be compared with the states supposed to provide conditions for hallucinations. The hallucinated individual is apparently having sensuous experiences without any background of sensuous reality. The analyst must be able to intuit psychic reality which has no known sensuous realization. ... I do not consider that the hallucinated patient is reporting a realization with a sensuous background; equally I do not consider an interpretation in psychoanalysis derives from facts accessible to sensuous apparatus. How then is one to explain the difference between an hallucination and an interpretation of an intuited psychoanalytic experience?
Based on this question raised by Bion, I think that the sensation, in the analyst’s mind, produced by the emotive-sensorial pictogram (Ferro 1995) or the affective pictogram (Rocha Barros, 2000) generated from the state of reverie, is something that has aspects which are close to an experience of hallucination: the analyst “hallucinates” seeing the shoes of a dead man; there is no perceptible sensory support. The experience can only be understood a posteriori – the analyst needs to tolerate this state of disorganization and disorientation, having a kind of psychoanalytic faith that a sense will arise from the experience with hallucinatory aspects, in the session itself, or after several sessions. In other words, it is necessary to tolerate not knowing, involving the negative capability (Bion 1970) of the analyst, a virtuously expectant capability (Chuster 2019).
A distinction should be made here regarding the reverie which occurred in the session that can be used to compose an interpretation or narrative construction, and that which is only an apprehension and understanding by the analyst of the patient’s unconscious psychic suffering, which will not be transformed in an interpretation. Reverie as a compass10 for the analytic process is exactly what happened in the session with Antônio; a “hallucinating” image of a dead man’s shoes condenses and reveals the most intimate and intense suffering of the patient. Reverie, in this case, served as a “north” for the analytic process that was beginning. When the reverie is used to compose an interpretation, the image can be revealed directly, although I would say that these situations are rarer, as the image produced by the reverie requires extensive elaboration work on the part of the analyst so that it becomes capable of being narrated for the patient in the form of an interpretation or analytical construction.
Contemporarily,11 the term reverie has been used as much to refer to a state of mind of openness to the other, a state without thought, as considered by authors such as Ogden, Ferro and Rocha Barros among others, the product of this mental state, that phenomen- alizes itself based on this state, carrying emotional and/or affective pictograms, exemplified in this case by the shoes of a dead man. This understanding is also present in the unpublished notes by Bion (1968/2014); reverie would be a way of manufacturing a thought, still without a thinker. The thought/image of the shoes of a dead man could only be thought of at the end of the session and, also, after it had ended, at the moment of repairing the analyst’s mind, that is, the container function of the theoretical exercise mentioned at the beginning of this text.
Rocha Barros and Rocha Barros (2019a) understand that the concept of reverie is associated with the intersubjective understanding of the analytical process and the understand- ing of how unconscious processes are captured. I highlight that, according to these authors, reverie happens via projective identification; in other words, projective identification is the Kleinian intuition that there is a pathway that connects the unconscious of two minds and conveys proto-thoughts,12 caught initially as pictographic images (Bion 1992a), affective pictograms (Rocha Barros, 2000a) or emotive-sensorial pictograms (1995).13
Rocha Barros and Rocha Barros (2019a) bring conceptual specifications that signifcantly corroborate the understanding of reverie: they are the aspects of expressiveness and evocation:
We ought to say something more about “expressivity” (109). This term is taken from R.G. Collingwood (1938) and Benedetto Croce (1925/2002), and it refers to an aspect of art that not only aims to describe or represent emotions, but also and principally to transmit them, producing them in the other, or in itself, based on an evocation of a mental representation coloured by emotion. This attribute of producing expressivity in the other seems essential to understanding not only art, but also the affective memory and the function of symbolic forms in psychic life and the process through which projective identifications operate. One of the functions of expressivity is that of activating the imagination. (translator’s translation)14
Based on these aesthetic aspects of expressivity and evocation, taking up again the clinical fragment, when I am captured by the image, all I see is death and I am paralysed. At that moment, the sensorial excess of the waking unconscious scene, the reverie, has an intense expressiveness and evocation (Rocha Barros, 2000b, 2011, 2015, 2019a, 2019b); at this moment a narrative is not possible. The sensation is of a “magnetic field”, something that evokes and calls, like a painting in an art gallery when we are abducted by an image, adrift in the experience, waiting for a moment a posteriori in order to understand what has happened, aware of the fact that this is not always possible. And when it becomes possible to narrate the experience, through a process of metabolization, the narrative is partial and we can only approximate the experience.
For Rocha Barros and Rocha Barros (2019b), it is necessary to transform the analyst’s reverie into a symbolic form that can be communicated to the patient. Therefore, it is the beginning of a process of apprehension of a sensorial experience. After an auto-ana- lytic work of reflection on the part of the analyst, it is possible to transform the reverie into something that could be communicated; in other words, the analyst turns the experience of reverie into something that can be thought, and transforms it into a communication that may generate transformations in the analytic pair. This process demands from the analyst a great amount of ability and creativity in the construction of a communication arising from the experience of reverie, and, in addition, of a communication that favours the transformations in the analytic field (Ribeiro 2019). In the clinical situation presented above, reverie favoured the understanding of the patient’s psychic suffering and did not transform itself in an interpretation or construction by the analyst.
Chuster (2019, 2020) presents another unique conceptual detailing as discussed in a previous paper (Ribeiro 2019); he understands reverie and the alpha function as vertices of a spectrum. The author shows that the concepts of reverie and alpha function make part of Bion’s contribution to the theory of dreams, as already stated above. Dreaming is a daytime function of the mind to process and metabolize emotional experiences, which has been termed waking dream thinking (a daydream). Reverie is predominantly sensorial, and the alpha function is predominantly symbolic; both are understood as vertices of an infinite spectrum of possibilities. Considering that when we understand a concept in a spectral manner, there is a point on the spectrum at which there is no distinction between one and the other, that is, a point at which we cannot distinguish reverie from alpha function, a point of undecidability.
Chuster (2020) also privileges and highlights the term imagination “because it is lin- guistically closer to the term reverie (daydream) used by Bion, and for contemplating more adequately, in my opinion, the question of the caesura between two mental states”, the caesura (Bion 1976, 40) between waking dream thinking and the night dream state. In other words, reverie would be this penumbral state, this twilight of the mind, in which we are partially awake but still dreaming, a state of transition, as described Rocha Barros and Rocha Barros (2019a).
Understanding reverie and alpha function as vertices of the same spectrum (Chuster 2018, 2019, 2020) seems to be a conceptual position that expands and specifies the discussion on clinical phenomena. What phenomenalizes in the clinical situation, which has the potential to become a narrative, construction or interpretation, runs the spectrum between predominantly sensorial experiences and predominantly symbolic experiences.
We can think of a progression in the spectrum, beginning in the sensorial vertex, the pictographic image, and proceeding to the symbolic vertex, the narrative. The use of reverie in an analyst’s narrative or simply for one’s own understanding of the analytic process, like a compass, is the apex of a complex process of psychic work. In the clinical situation presented, it was possible to understand that the analytic process that was being initiated was a walk through dead lands, dead from the excess of psychic pain, devitalized, and one that required the analyst’s capacity for “dreaming”.
However, what is this strange phenomenon of the analyst hallucinating the shoes of a dead man? Without any sensorial support? Below or beyond the sensorial, there is psy- choanalytic intuition. As Bion (1967b) writes, intuition is not sensorial but seems to find some indiscernible support that is not identifiable in the sensorial realm.15 Bion (1992a) writes about infra- and supra-sensual aspects, which means that the amalgamation of intuition and reverie opens up as a question to be addressed, even if briefly.
Reverie: an evolution of psychoanalytic intuition?
How can we think about the connection between intuition and reverie? Does the reverie state of the analyst’s mind have as its mainstay, beyond and below the sensorial, supra- or infra-sensual (Bion 1992a), the analyst’s capacity for intuition? In other words, psychoanalytic intuition seems to be a primordial factor of the psychoanalytic function of personality (Bion 1962), which does not phenomenalize itself, and which one cannot hear or perceive. This is the necessary ability of the analyst, to see and hear what is not visible to the eyes or audible to the ears, but is visible to the imagination – the analyst’s capacity for reverie sustained by psychoanalytic intuition.
Starting from the etymology of the word intuition, according to Zimmerman (2012, 167):
the “the word intuition is composed of the etymons ‘in’ (meaning from within) and the Latin verb “tuere” (“to look”, “to see”), and shows that the capacity of intuition consists in the fact that analysts manage to “look within themselves” with a sort of “third eye” that permits them to see beyond what our sense organs can capture”. (translator’s translation)
What can be portrayed as psychoanalytic intuition occurs beyond and below any sen- soriality, or, in infra- or supra-sensual ways (Bion 1992a), as stated above. Anxieties have no smell, cannot be seen or touched – they are intuited by the analyst’s mind as described by Bion (1967b). A beam of intense darkness (Bion 1967b) is required in order to intuit in the here and now of the session, to make the invisible of the experience visible. And, from reverie and its imagery construction, the analyst still needs to be able to put the experience of reverie in a narrative, that is, to go towards the most symbolic pole of the function. It should be emphasized that the narrative is partial, uncertain and provisory, merely an approximation of the lived experience, for the experience or the fact itself are unknowable in their entirety.
In this way, we have the possible narrative of each session, the emotions that may be contained, revealed, created by words: the shoes of a dead man, of someone alive who treads devitalized, dead psychic terrains, raw facts still not dreamt. Since what becomes a word is saturated and finite, and opens up again to the field of the unsaturated, of emotions that are not yet words, in an endless cycle, in the incessant search for the meaning and truth of experience, in the human search of the possibility of dreaming the enigmatic of the experience.
Continuing with this reflection, the image produced by the state of reverie brings the inebriating sensation that we are almost hallucinating, for there is no identifiable sensory support. Reverie is an emotive-sensorial pictogram (Ferro 1995) or an affective pictogram (Rocha Barros 2000a, 2000b), first “hallucinated” by the analyst; however, our hallucination encounters a sense that rescues us from chaos, that is paradoxically both maddening and seminal.
Keeping in mind that Freud (1937) made an analogy between the analyst’s constructions and the patient’s delusion, would this be a Freudian intuition? Perhaps it would. And what could favour the analyst’s intuition? Precisely the complex technical proposition of Bion (1967b): the mind of the analyst ought to be in a state of openness to the unknown, a state that implies the opacity of memory, desire and prior understanding.
Bion (1967b) understands that memory and desire are derived from sensoriality, and are intensified by it, and they do not seem to favour intuition and reverie, which is why Bion makes this technical suggestion that is still difficult to grasp nowadays. An analogy made by Bion (1970) helps us to understand this methodological proposal. Memory and desire are like a leakage of light that rushes into the process of developing pictures, burning the exposed film. Memory and desire, the past and the future, make it impossible to develop images that can be dreamt in the here and now of the session, in the penumbra of the mind, in the twilight of the state of reverie, a transitionality state (Rocha Barros and Rocha Barros 2019b), revealed in the lived present, the only time of experience.
Reflecting on Bion’s (1967b) “Notes on Memory and Desire”, Ogden (2016, 79) writes that it is an article about intuitive thinking in the analytic situation:
For me, reverie ... , waking dreaming, is paradigmatic of the clinical experience of intuiting the psychic reality of a moment of an analysis. In order to enter a state of reverie, which in the analytic setting is always in part an intersubjective phenomenon, the analyst must engage in an act of self-renunciation. I mean the act of allowing oneself to become less definitively oneself in order to create a psychological space in which analyst and patient may enter into a shared state of intuiting and being-at-one-with a disturbing psychic reality that the patient, on his own, is unable to bear.
I understand reverie as a state of mind, a loving opening to the other, a hospitality, which produces or favours the emergence of a pictographic image. I think that the image that emerges from the reverie is an evolution of the analyst’s intuition – and this is the hypothesis supported in this text. Reverie as a thought/image that up to this point was not thought, and that is favoured by psychoanalytic intuition. Intuition as some- thing non-sensorial, but with infra- and supra-sensuous elements (Bion 1992b/2000), as already said, an essential capacity of the human mind.
Taking up the clinical fragment presented, the pictorial image that arises in the session (the shoes of a dead man) has as its support the psychoanalytic intuition and the analyst’s capacity for reverie. In addition, the image also has other meanings: the image becomes the selected fact16 (Bion 1963) of the whole therapeutic process that will unfold itself, a memory for the future of the analysis that is beginning. An analytic process in which the analysand and the analyst will walk through dead lands, devitalized terrains, without contact with emotional truth, in which the pain has not been yet suffered (Bion 1970), the facts were not dreamed, they remain meaningless, without narrative, just a blind and raw pain.
Bion (1963/1967b/1992a/2014) proposes the name “selected fact” based on the work of the mathematician Poincaré (Science and Method; 1914). A selected fact would be some- thing that would install a certain order in the complexity of the elements, and in this way, it makes understandable what initially was a disorganized experience. Bion (1967b/ 2014) makes an analogy between the selected fact and an image that is fixed in a kaleidoscope, giving a momentary sense to the disorganized and moving elements, an image that evolves from the session.
Britton (1998) will address in the text “The Analyst’s Intuition: Selected Fact or Overvalued Idea?” a discussion that is close, in some aspects, to what I am discussing: the selected fact, in the clinical fragment exposed, a reverie, evolves from the analyst’s capacity for intuition, and initially the sensation is of something hallucinatory.
The selected fact guides the analyst in the session and brings them closer to the patient’s psychic reality. However, Britton (1998) problematizes: how to distinguish it from an overvalued idea? It is precisely in the posteriority of the session that we will be able to know if it is an intuition or a hallucination of the analyst. An overvalued idea is a pre-selected fact, and not something that evolves from the experience with the patient in the session. The theories of the analyst may be used as pre-selected facts, over- valued and hallucinated, that may make the analyst impermeable to the disorganized emotions generated by the turbulence of the encounter of two personalities, that of the analysand and that of the analyst.
Britton (1998) writes that the emergence of a selected fact involves three transformational sequences: from the paranoid-schizoid to the depressive position; from the non- contained to the contained element; and from pre-conception to conception. The over- valued idea would be a pre-selected fact, that is, the psychic impossibility of the analyst to wait for the emergence of the selected fact, which implies patience and tolerance for not knowing – the negative capability of the analyst’s mind. The pre-selected fact may be the analyst’s attachment to psychoanalytic theory due to the predominance of memory and desire. Britton (1998, 108) concludes: “the problem is that the analyst will be encouraged to believe that his overvalued ideas are the selected fact, as consensual agreement is valued more highly than the truth”.
In the clinical fragment, the selected fact is the reverie of a dead man’s shoes. A picto- gram that momentarily organized the emotional turbulence of the encounter with Antônio. Given that the image of the dead man’s shoes favoured the understanding of the patient’s psychic suffering, it did not transform itself into interpretation or construction. Besides, it was not merely a selected fact of this first encounter, it was an iconic pictogram of the entire analytic process that unfolded from that moment onwards. For years, the analysis progressed through dead and devitalized areas that were gradually coming back to life, making it possible for Antônio to have a fulfilling experience with himself and with the people he was connected to.
I consider it to be something uncommon that a clinical fragment with these characteristics offers itself in a generous manner for the understanding of these complex mental processes that occur in the emotional turbulence of analytic encounters. It was not possible to highlight any identifiable sensorial support17 – the initial sensation for the analyst was of an image with hallucinatory characteristics, as already stated, and precisely for this reason it remained as a clinical fragment to be theoretically metabolized.
Psychoanalytic intuition and reverie: some notes
Having the work of Bion as a reference, how can we think of an immediate and intuited knowledge, which has characteristics that can resemble a hallucination, since it presents itself as a vision that does not go through the processes that we are accustomed to vali- date as thought processes (deduction, association, comparison, analysis, observation etc.), but as something that appears as an image, that we see, or better said, that we create in an imaginary way, without identifiable sensory support?
The hypothesis that I raise is that intuition happens between caesuras in constant oscil- lation: finite/infinite;18 self/other; formation/deformation; transformations in K/transform- ations in O.19 Considering that, we may also think of the intuition/hallucination caesura,20 a construction that is made succinctly in this text.
A caesura is a synapse, a connection, it is the link, as Bion (1977) writes. The term originally refers to a pause in a poem, in the stanza, a space that gives rhythm, that makes a connection, that generates rupture and movement. Bion (1977/2014, 49) writes:
Rephrasing Freud’s statement for my own convenience: There is much more continuity between autonomically appropriate quanta and the waves of conscious thought and feeling than the impressive caesura of transference and counter-transference would have us believe. So ... ? Investigate the caesura; not the analyst; not the analysand; not the unconscious; not the conscious; not sanity; not insanity. But the caesura, the link, the synapse, the (counter-transference, the transitive–intransitive mood).
We can think of the caesura between different mental states, for example, the twilight when we wake up, at which time we have a dream scene in mind and for a moment there is no differentiation between the scene and the waking world, we have the impression that it was lived, and suddenly we wake up and realize that the scene was experienced in a dream, and quickly evaporates in the light of day. In the caesura between dream and wakefulness, there is connection, there is both continuity and rupture between two mental states. From the understanding that the mind works in a continuous oscillation between mental states, I propose the intuition/hallucination caesura.
Intuition is a kind of phenomenon, an enigmatic affectation, which takes place in the caesura; it happens in the oscillation between the undifferentiated area of the mind, still formless, and the differentiated area, evolving into a reverie, and for this reason we can have the impression of a hallucination, as it is an imaginative creation (Chuster 2019, 2020), and therefore a form, which finds meaning only a posteriori. It takes time to know on which side of the caesura we are, hallucination or intuition, as in the clinical fragment of the dead man’s shoes, which initially is lived as a hallucination, and later is realized as a reverie from the analyst’s mind.
Intuition can be favoured by the analyst’s discipline of observation in the analytic field. The analytic observation is practised beginning with Bion’s (1965, 1967b) methodological proposal: suspending memory, desire and prior understanding. The experience is per- ceived, first of all, as a raw (beta), enigmatic element (Figueiredo, Ribeiro, and Tamburrino 2011).
I think that Bion’s proposal in the 1967 article “Notes on Memory and Desire” may be understood as a caesura in the analytical methodology, that is, as representing as much a continuity of the Freudian proposal of free-floating attention as a rupture, for it summons the intuitive capacity of the analyst, not only their associative and analytic thought, but also their imaginative thought,21 the creative imagination (Chuster 2019), the capacity to be affected by enigmatic experience and to construct a thought: the reverie.
Memory (past), desire (future) and prior understanding are opacities that obstruct the analyst’s capacity for intuition and psychoanalytically trained observation. Bion (1992a) writes that intuition operates between opacities and transparencies, that is, in the caesura between opacities and transparencies.
Bion (1970)22 makes an analogy that helps us understand this psychic process already referred to in this text: the photographic negative before the digital era. I make a subtly diverse appropriation of this analogy: the negative is a transparent dark film that receives any impressions or, we could say, any enigmatic affectations. The analyst’s mind would require this negative quality, a quality of reception, of hospitality, of containment for any affectation. In the process of development the image, or rather realization,23 achieved through elements that need a period of time in order to produce an effect and a dark room so that the negative affectation can become realized as an image, that is, a beam of intense darkness that needs time and space. There is a unique and complex composition of elements so that the realization of the image may occur. Memory, desire and prior understanding may be the precipitous light that burns the film before the image is developed. The image is created from the affectation in the negative pole of the analyst’s mind, their negative capability, and by the psychoanalytic observation, under the aegis of the alpha transforming function that turns the enigmatic of the experience into a sensorial psychic element that can be thought, the reverie.
Psychoanalytically trained observation is the analyst’s discipline in order not to burn the film with their own personal24 equation25 (Bion 1992a). Analysts’ training are their per- sonal analysis and their analytic ethic.
From Bion onwards, concepts are understood in a spectral manner; as already said, in this way intuition would have both a pole in the capacity of psychoanalytic observation, and an unconscious pole, in which the alpha function does its work: the transformation of raw emotional experience, the enigmatic of the experience, into a dream-like element, the image produced by reverie, an imaginative thought. In other words, there is a constant transit, absurdly fast, fleeting and always unstable, between the caesura of the finite (con- sciousness, form, area of differentiation of the mind) and the infinite (unconscious, formless, area of undifferentiation of the mind). In the constant oscillation of the various caesuras, intuition emerges like lightning in a blue sky, the enigmatic affectation, inevitably turbulent.
Intuition operates in constant transit between the caesura where the analyst’s capacity for reverie/alpha function sustains itself, a capacity to imagine and create psychic elements. In this manner, the psychoanalytic intuition is favoured by the analyst’s trained capacity for observation, the negative capability.
In other words, psychoanalytic intuition happens between caesuras, a continuous passage between mental states: non-sensorial/sensorial; finite/infinite; transformations in K/transformations in O; known/unknown; self/other. Apart from considering a continuous oscillation, based on a spectral understanding of the concepts, there is always a point of undecidability, that is, a point in which it is not possible to know which of the two poles of the spectrum we are at. And, perhaps, the point may also be an area, a territory of con- ceptual and phenomenological undifferentiation. To put it in another way, imprecision and undecidability are part of the nuances of the caesuras that constitute the psyche, with their opacities and transparencies. Due to this, we need to put a certain imprecision on to the psychoanalytic concepts; that is, the concepts of intuition, alpha function and reverie are intertwined, a clear differentiation between these concepts being epistemologically unfeasible.
If we think from the vertex of Bion’s (1965) theory of transformations, the intuition would be in “O”, at-one-ment with the patient, and the image produced by reverie would be a transformation into “K”, an imaginative thought in search of a thinker. The narrative that can be constructed from the reverie is the analyst’s construction.
Returning to Bion, the origin of each and every transformation is unknowable, it is O shared equally, even if in a diverse way, by both analyst and patient in the session: “I therefore postulate that O in any analytic situation is available for transformation by analyst and analysand equally” (Bion 1965/2014, 169). The turbulence generated by the encounter with Antônio – as Bion (1979) writes, the encounter between two personalities is always a “bad job” – quickly evolves through a pictorial representation, a reverie in the analyst’s mind: the image of a dead man’s shoes, which also becomes the session’s selected fact, as explained above. The pictorial image is already a product of a process of transformation, from which we do not have access to the origin.
The analyst in a state of negative capability is dragged by the emotional experience, momentarily without sense. The negative capability is the state of mind without memory, desire and prior understanding, a state of receptivity to O, and, also, favouring psychoanalytic intuition. It is necessary to have patience (a paranoid-schizoid state of mind) and faith – the act of faith (Bion 1970) that some sense will emerge in the posteriority of the situation – something that generates a state of security (a depressive state of mind), which provides an evolution in K, an understanding of the patient’s psychic suffering by way of a pictographic image, the reverie.
Reverie can be understood as an imaginative capacity of the mind or a thought (Bion 1968/2014), a creative imagination (Chuster 2019) or an imaginative thought; are these all successful nominations and transformations based on the initial postulations by Bion (1959, 1962). From this perspective, we can think of the intuition/hallucination caesura, in that there is a point of undecidability, a moment in which we do not know whether the image that overwhelms us in the session, the reverie – the shoes of a dead man – is a hallucination or whether it is an intuition.
By way of conclusion
The facts, the experience in itself, what is unknowable, can be partially transformed into dreams, writes Bion in the epigraph of this text. The experience needs to be dreamt by the alpha function, this transforming and meaning-making function. The facts need to be dreamt, “unconscientized” – the other way of interpreting dreams. The dreams are a way of interpreting facts, the transformation of the brutality of life into dream-like elements, which find meaning through images, and afterwards in narratives, the interpretations and constructions of the analyst in the session.
Intuition is not sensorial, but it holds some undiscernible support in the sensorial world, hardly identifiable. To use an analogy, we may understand the infra-sensuous and ultra-sen- suous elements referred to by Bion (1992b/2000) as the sounds that are not captured by the human ear, and also we can think of those people who have a “musical ear”, who hear musical notes in a way that few can hear. This is a good metaphor for the analyst: one who captures, through intuition, psychic elements that are inaudible and imperceptible to some, but to those with analytic intuitive ears and a trained capacity of observation it is possible to capture inaudible notes or the imperceptible silence between them. And if we are not hallucinating, we are intuiting psychic elements in a raw state.
In conclusion, I believe that psychoanalytic intuition is an enigmatic affectation that occurs fleetingly in the continuous and oscillating transit between different caesuras, and that evolves into an image, a reverie, through creative imagination. The expression creative imagination (Chuster 2019) is successful: an image in action, in movement, a psychic element, a reverie, a thought (Bion 1968/2014) in search of a thinker in the analyst–analysand duo. Succinctly, I understand reverie as an imaginative thought that evolves in the session and occurs in constant oscillation between caesuras starting from the analyst’s capacity for intuition.
I end this text with an epigraph from Ogden’s (1997/2013, 157) text Reverie and Interpretation, quoting novelist Henry James (1884), as I believe this to be a successful con- ceptual definition, seized by the mind’s capacity for poiesis, that is, reverie itself:
Experience is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue. It is the very atmosphere of the mind; and when the mind is imaginative ... it takes to itself the faintest hints of life ...
Notes:
CONTACT Marina Ferreira da Rosa Ribeiro marinaribeiro@usp.br University of São Paulo, Psychology Institute, Prof. Mello de Moraes 1721 Bloco F, São Paulo, 05508030 Brazil
1.“Pre-conception, as I have placed it in row D of the Grid, is a term representing a stage in the development of thinking; preconception, in the sense of the analyst’s theoretical preconceptions refers to the use of a theory and so belongs to columns 3 and 4 of the Grid” (Bion 1963/2014, 64). © 2022 Institute of Psychoanalysis
2. This fragment was presented in two scientific meetings online (2020, 2021) available on Youtube: https://www.youtu- be.com/watch?v=jWHTWg-Gu9E and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z01HZE_p8jo.
3. am circumscribing the discussion of the concept of reverie in this article as a pictorial representation, an image. Civi- tarese (2016a) refers to body reveries; however, due to the complexity of this debate, which would justify a separate text, I remain in the field of understanding reverie as a pictogram or ideogram, that is, as postulated by Bion.
4. use the expression pictorial image because it is an image that is “painted” in the mind of the analyst; its origin in Latin is pictōr, painter. In the book Cogitations, Bion (2000) uses the terms ideogram, pictorial representation and pictographic images practically as synonyms. 5.“The act of faith ... Thus he designates an act that is carried out in the realm of science and ought to be distinguished from its usual meaning with religious connotations ... It refers to the necessity of the subject to believe that there is a reality that is not known to them and is out of their reach” (Zimmerman 2004, 78, translator’s translation).
6.Verbal communication (2020).
7.Bush (2019) published the book The Analyst’s Reveries: Exploration in Bion’s Enigmatic Concept, dedicated to the concept and its diverse understandings in three of the principal post-Bionian authors: Thomas Ogden, Antonino Ferro, and Rocha Barros and Rocha Barros.
8.In the original: “9. Thoughts. Freud on thinking (‘Two Principles’) ‘Thoughts are a nuisance’. Thoughts logically and epistemologically, prior to thinking. 10. Importance of Reverie. Importance for analyst because he thus manufactures ‘Thoughts’” (Bion 1968/2014, 76/77). 9.The visual flash is an expression of Meltzer (1984/2009), and refers to an image that is “seen” externally; in other words, it has a more intense hallucinatory component. What differentiates it from a hallucination is the sense of the image that emerges a posteriori.
10.Ogden’s (2013) expression.11According to the book From Reverie to Interpretation. Transforming Thought into the Action of Psychoanalysis (Blue and Harrang 2016).
12.Proto-thought is Bion’s (1948–1951) expression when referring to something that is not yet a thought, but has the potential to be one, an ideogram.
13.Bearing in mind that discussing the distinction between these terms would require a separate work.
14.Original emphasis.
15.In the book Cogitations (1992a) Bion uses the terms infra-sensorial and ultra-sensorial – we may make an analogy with ultraviolet rays that are imperceptible to the eye but nevertheless produce effects.
16.“Selected fact: this important concept – inspired by the mathematician Poincaré – refers to a search for a fact that gives coherence, significance and names to facts already known in isolation, but whose interrelations were not yet perceived” (Zimmerman 2004, 86, translator’s translation).
17.The actual shoes of the patient did not have any peculiarity that could have been a sensorial support for the image of the shoes of a dead man. In addition, there was no information about the patient prior to the meeting, which makes this clinical fragment interesting for the approximation of the concepts of intuition and reverie.
18.Bion proposes the terms finite for conscious and infinite for unconscious.
19.Later in the text I join intuition with Bion’s (1965) theory of transformations.
20.A suggestion made by Evelise Marra at a scientific encounter (2021).
21.Imaginative thought is a term that emerged during the writing of this article.
22.Picked up on by Chuster (1996).
23.Realization in the sense of making the invisible visible – I am using the term in a lay manner. Realization is one of Bion’s concepts that has different understandings over the course of his work.
24.Keeping in mind that, for Bion, countertransference is always unconscious.
25.Traits or characteristics.
Translations of summary
Intuition psychanalytique et reverie: saisir des faits non encore rêvés. L’auteure de cet article entreprend de faire dialoguer certains concepts de Bion avec ceux émanant de l’œuvre de psychanalystes bio- niens (Ogden, Ferro, Rocha Barros et Chuster), en privilégiant notamment les concepts d’intuition psychanalytique, de reverie et de fonction alpha. Comment pouvons nous penser la relation entre reverie et intuition ? L’état de reverie de l’analyste pourrait-il voir son centre être occupé – avant et au-delà du sensoriel, dans l’infra et l’ultra sensoriel – par la capacité d’intuition de l’analyste ? L’auteure décrit l’expérience troublante d’une analyste dans son cabinet, qui observe comment opèrent les concepts dans le matériel clinique. Le matériel clinique étaye l’hypothèse selon laquelle la reverie est un avatar de l’intuition psychanalytique et que l’intuition se produit entre les césures, comme le soutient Bion avec sa proposition : sans mémoire, sans désir, sans compréhension a priori, autrement dit la capacité négative.
Die psychoanalytische Intuition und die Träumerei: Erfassen von noch nicht geträumten Tatsachen. Dieser Artikel stellt einen Dialog zwischen einigen Konzepten Bion‘s und denen post-Bionianischer Psycho- analytiker (Ogden, Ferro, Rocha Barros und Chuster) her, insbesondere über die psychoanalytische Intuition, Träumerei und die Alpha-Funktion. Wie können wir über den Zusammenhang zwischen Träumerei und Intuition nachdenken? Könnte die Intuitionsfähigkeit des Analytikers im Zentrum des träumerischen Zustands des Analytikers - vor und jenseits des Sinnlichen, im Infra- und Ultra- Sinnlichen - stehen? In dieser Arbeit wird eine beunruhigende Erfahrung einer Analytikerin in ihrem Behandlungsraum geschildert, um zu sehen, wie sich die Konzepte im klinischen Material zeigen. Das klinische Material stützt die Hypothese, dass die Träumerei eine Entwicklung der psy- choanalytischen Intuition ist und dass Intuition zwischen Zäsuren auftritt, was unterstützt wird von Bion‘s Vorschlag, keiner Erinnerung, keines Wunsches, keines vorherigen Verstehens, d.h. eine negative Fähigkeit.
L’intuizione psicoanalitica e la reverie. Registrare fatti non ancora sognati. Il presente lavoro si propone di far dialogare alcuni concetti sviluppati da Bion con quelli utilizzati dagli psicoanalisti post-bio- niani (Ogden, Ferro, Rocha Barros e Chuster), concentrandosi in particolare sull’intuizione psicoanalitica, sulla reverie e sulla funzione alfa. Come si può pensare il rapporto tra reverie e intuizione? Ha senso immaginare che lo stato di reverie dell’analista abbia al suo centro - prima e al di là della dimensione sensoriale, e dunque nell’infra e nell’ultrasensoriale - la capacità di intuizione dell’ana- lista? L’articolo presenta la disturbante esperienza occorsa a un’analista al lavoro, osservando come i concetti qui in esame siano operanti nel contesto del materiale clinico. Il materiale clinico funge da appoggio all’ipotesi che la reverie costituisca un’evoluzione dell’intuizione psicoanalitica, e che l’intuizione abbia luogo tra cesure - un’idea, questa, supportata dall’invito bioniano a porsi in un assetto psichico senza memoria e desiderio e senza una comprensione precostituita dei fatti: vale a dire, in un assetto di capacità negativa.
La intuición psicoanalítica y la reverie: la captación de hechos aun no soñados. Este artículo promueve el diálogo entre algunos conceptos de Bion y aquellos de los psicoanalistas posbionianos (Ogden, Ferro, Rocha Barros y Chuster), con especial atención a la intuición psicoanalítica, a la reverie y a la función alpha. ¿Cómo podemos pensar la conexión entre reverie e intuición? ¿Es posible que el estado de reverie del analista tenga como centro –antes y más allá de lo sensorial, en lo infra y ultra sensorial– la capacidad de intuición del analista? Se presenta una experiencia perturbadora de una analista en su consultorio, en la que se examina cómo funcionan los conceptos en el material clínico. Este material confirma la hipótesis de que la reverie es una evolución de la intuición psicoanalítica y que la intuición ocurre entre cesuras, lo cual se apoya en la propuesta de Bion de sin memoria, ni deseo, ni comprensión previa, es decir, la capacidad negativa.
ORCID
Marina Ferreira da Rosa Ribeiro http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2278-063X
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