ABSTRACT
J. Grotstein, discussing the nature of projective identification, clarified that reverie refers to receptivity, including the mother's mental activity when the infant normally projects into her. Reverie is a specific function of the mother which allows her to feel the infant in her, and to give shape and words to the infant's experience. Reverie is a unique experience of the therapist and is connected with countertransference. W. R. Bion includes the aspect: the mother's reverie, which complements the infant's projective phantasies. The clinical value of the container–contained and reverie concepts is underlined by another analyst, T. Ogden. Ogden not only acknowledged reverie but he embodied it in his analysis of the transference-countertransference phenomena. In conceptualizing reveries, Ogden stressed that they are derived from the "interplay of the unconscious life of the analysand and that of the analyst" and that the creation of reveries is partly an unconscious intersubjective construction.
