Reverie has been defined as an equanimous yet passionate capacity to contain and process the other’s emotional experiencing, taking almost any form. This study responds to a gap for research into this potentially powerful relational phenomenon with UK-based psychological therapists who are not psychoanalysts, by exploring how they experience, use and make sense of reverie and by investigating its potential as a qualitative research tool.
Informed by a bricolage of hermeneutic-phenomenological and practitioner-based methodologies, the study investigates reverie with seven qualified therapists working in the UK in a range of modalities. Participants took part in two video-recorded interviews, in the first focusing on reverie in clinical work and in the second reviewing with the researcher clips from the first interview. Video-stills from the interviews (of the researcher only, to protect participants’ anonymity) are used throughout the thesis to illustrate non-verbal aspects of reverie use. The researcher reflected on her own ‘live’ reverie-experiencing in the interviews and encouraged participants to do likewise, and incorporated her reveries within the data analysis also.
Analysis revealed eight superordinate themes, grouped in three categories. Paying attention to reverie can offer access to heart-felt relational information so subtle it might otherwise escape attention; information that can be used sensitively to intuit, empathise with and make sense of others’ spoken and unspoken meanings on personal, interpersonal and what may be regarded as transpersonal levels. Such work takes place in the space between consciousness and unconsciousness and between people; a potentially transformative space of ‘pied beauty’ (Manley Hopkins, 2001, p.265), filled with darkness and light, which can facilitate deep, soulful interconnection in therapy and research. Throughout the work readers are invited to enter that space by focusing on their own inner experiencing as they read, thereby gaining a living snapshot of their own reverie
