Reverie, Thomas Ogden

Reverie and Metaphor: Some Thoughts on How I Work as a Psychoanalyst (1997)

Analytic Third

When I work, I attend to “my sense of what, if anything, feels most alive, most real in what is transpiring.” This can be difficult because much of what I’m feelings about the analysand is unconscious. Many of these unconscious feelings are part of “the intersubjective construction that the patient and I are in the midst of creating,” that is, the intersubjective analytic third.

Reverie

One way I understand the analytic third is through reverie, which includes “the most mundane, quotidian, unobtrusive thoughts, feelings, fantasies, ruminations, daydreams, bodily sensations and so on that usually feel utterly disconnected from what the patient is saying and doing at the moment.” Much like dreams, reveries can easily slip away: “A reverie that has at one moment seemed fully available to conscious awareness will frequently at the next moment seem to have 'disappeared', leaving only a non-specific residue of feeling in its wake.”

Example

In a session, Mr. W was talking about being “mentally out of control” and said that “I was the only person to whom he had revealed the full extent of his ‘craziness.’” As he was talking, my mind wandered to his upcoming 50th birthday and a joke I’d recently made to a friend “that I was ‘handling’ turning 50 by refusing to believe it.” Refocusing my attention on Mr. W, “I attempted to consider my reverie in the context of what was going on in the analytic relationship.”

Turning 50 made me sad and afraid, and my joke was a defensive attempt to distance myself from this sadness and fear. My reverie of the joke allowed me to see that Mr. W was doing something similar, that is, trying to distance himself from “the aspect of himself that felt ‘crazy’ and utterly outside of his control.”

Limits of Language

We primarily communicate through language, but the names we have for feelings — e.g., “fear,” “loneliness,” “despair” — “are generic labels for categories of feeling and often, in themselves, convey very little of the speaker's unique, individual experience in that moment. When a patient tells me that she felt despairing over the weekend, I may ask what her despair felt like. Or if she is a patient who has difficulty knowing what she feels or even where she feels it, I might ask: 'How did you know you were feeling despairing?' or 'Where in your body did you feel the despair?”

Metaphor

“With metaphor, we say one thing in terms of another.” Our ordinary language is filled with metaphors, “albeit often deadened in effect by over-usage or else hardly detectable because it has become so much a part of the meaning of the word. For example, each time a patient speaks to us or we speak to a patient about feeling 'under pressure', 'tongue-tied', 'feeling worn out', 'being deaf', 'torn', 'divided', 'racked with pain', 'emotionally drained,’ 'not giving a shit' etc., the patient and analyst are intro-ducing metaphors that might be elaborated, modified, 'turned on their ear', and so on.” As Emerson wrote, “The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture. Language is fossil poetry.”

When we ask what a feeling is <i>like</i>, we’re engaged in the use of metaphor. My interventions often “take the form of elaborating a metaphor that the patient or I have (usually unself-consciously) introduced.” For example, when referring to a patient’s failed marriage, I said, “From what you've said, it seems that the marriage felt to you as if it never took off as opposed to having crashed.” The patient responded, “It felt like I was just a passenger. I hate my passivity, the way I can go blank for years on end. I just sat there as if I had no say in what was happening. I don't have to tell you about it-you see it for yourself every time I'm here.” The patient, in other words, “elaborated on my metaphor of the flight of a plane and added her own metaphorical imagery that centred on 'sitting there' passively ('blankly') as a passenger on the plane. This new metaphor then became the 'analytic object' to which the patient and I responded.”

Reverie and Metaphor

“Reverie is a process in which metaphors are created that give shape to the analyst's experience of the unconscious dimensions of the analytic relationship. Unconscious experience can only be 'seen' (reflected upon) when re-presented to oneself metaphorical.” For example, when I had my reverie of my joke about turning 50, “I was (unconsciously) creating a metaphor of what was going on between the patient and me,” as we were both handling experiences that cannot be controlled (aging, insanity) in similar ways. “Both of us in our own ways had until that point been ‘refusing to believe it’.”

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Reverie and Interpretation (1997)

Reveries are “our ruminations, daydreams, fantasies, bodily sensations, fleeting perceptions, images emerging from states of half-sleep, tunes, and phrases that run through our minds, and so on.” “Reverie is an exquisitely private dimension of experience involving the most embarrassingly quotidian (and yet all-important) aspects of our lives.”

Reveries are both subjective and intersubjective. “Paradoxically, as personal and private as our reveries feel to us, it is misleading to view them as ‘our’ personal creations, since reverie is at the same time an aspect of a jointly (but asymmetrically) created unconscious intersubjective construction that I have termed ‘the intersubjective analytic third.’” “To paraphrase and extend Winnicott (1960), there is no such thing as an analysand apart from the analyst; at the same time the analyst and analysand are separate individuals, each with his or her own mind, body, history, and so on.”

Consequently, we make a mistake when we dismiss as reverie “as simply our ‘own stuff,’ i.e., as a reflection of our own unresolved conflicts, our distress regarding events in our current life (however real and important those events might be), our state of fatigue, our tendency to be self-absorbed. An important event in the analyst's life, such as the chronic illness of a child, is differently contextualized by the analyst's experience with each patient, and as a result becomes a different ‘analytic object’ in each analysis.”

“For example, while sitting with one patient, the analyst may be consumed by feelings of intense helplessness regarding the inability to relieve the pain that his or her child is experiencing. While with another patient (or at a different moment in the hour with the same patient), the analyst may be almost entirely preoccupied with feelings of envy of friends whose children are healthy. While with still another patient, the analyst might be filled with terrible sadness in imagining what it would feel like to attempt to live without one's child.”

Case Study. The case study is fascinating, but I’m going to just highlight two parts of it. (1) Before the patient, Ms. B, entered his office, he experienced strong somatic symptoms. “I find it invaluable to be as fully aware as I can of what it feels like to meet the patient each session (including the feelings, thoughts, fantasies, and bodily sensations experienced in anticipation of that particular meeting).”

(2) At one point in the first session discussed, he associated to a friend who would be having open-heart surgery, which aroused his own fear of dying. He then started to feel “a sense of psychic numbness, a feeling of detachment that felt something like the onset of emotional dulling after rapidly drinking a glass of wine.” He then realized he had a new feeling, one of “profound loneliness and loss that was unmistakably connected with the recent death of a close friend.”

Then refocusing on Ms. B, he noticed that she was “speaking in a rather pressured way.” He continued listening and concluded that behind the “idealized picture being presented were feelings of loneliness and hopelessness.” He later realized that his reverie experiences had left him “acutely sensitive to the experience of psychological pain disguised by reliance on manic defense, particularly the pain of efforts to live with terrible loneliness and in isolation with one's feelings of powerlessness.”