ABSTRACT
D. W. Winnicott cautions that the author has to undergo a "critical personal experience" to deeply comprehend the patient's psychic reality. Psychic reality is a term that refers to the total psychoanalytic situation of patient and analyst. Cultivating a state of reverie is challenging because there is a conflict between the couple's wish for oneness and the requirement of accepting difference. Transference and countertransference exposures occur as vague discharges or defined moods. Countertransference valences are hardly neutral. Interventive choices draw on ideas about assessment and the author rely on a practice model, but therapeutic moments are shaped by who the author are, and by reverie. The small voice of the child rises from the din of development because reverie restores its value. Reverie created a potential space. As each partner's unmet yearning to be special surfaced in the author mind, the apple metaphor offered an affective link.
