Champ incarné et rêverie somatique

Abstract

Unlike Ogden’s concepts of “sensory reverie,” which is perceived as such
almost immediately, and “interpretative action,” which is characterized by
obvious intentionality, body reverie is neither intentional nor conscious.
Rather, it is an action or sequence of actions to which the meaning of an acted-
out performance can be attributed only in retrospect: a performance that
is a kind of understanding through the body or of dreaming in the body what
is unconsciously going on in the analytic field at a given moment or over a
longer period of time. I would not even use the term enactment, a word too closely identified with the idea of the unreflective offloading of instinctual drives or proto-emotions, and not necessarily through behaviour. Moreover, the concept of enactment is still framed within a theory that sees two separate subjects in interaction and that, strictly speaking, is not authentically intersubjective. Of course in order to use the concept of somatic reverie we need to adopt Bion’s view of the unconscious as a “psychoanalytic function of the personality,” his new theory of dreaming as a way of giving meaning to emotional experience, and the subsequent development that these ideas had in the so-called post-Bionian theory of the analytic field.