Intimate Innovation

Bion’s concept of maternal “reverie” as the capacity to sense (and make sense of) what is going on inside the infant has been an important element in post-Kleinian thought: “..reverie is an act of faith in unconscious process…essential to alpha-function'” Some commentators consider it to be the equivalent of Stern’s ‘attunement’, or Winnicott’s ‘maternal preoccupation’. In therapy, the analyst’s use of “reverie” is an important tool in his/her response to the patient’s material: “it is this capacity for playing with a patient’s images” that Bion encouraged. Part of the role of reverie – in this specific context – is “….to prevent someone who knows from filling the empty space”.

It seems significant (or at least a coincidence worth pausing over) to consider this idea of ‘capacity’. Many references to reverie speak of the ‘maternal capacity’ for it (this is how Bion refers to it). Similarly, Winnicott speaks in terms of maternal provision (of care, of neglect, of failure etc) . And Daniel Stern – as we shall touch on later – speaks in terms of vitality and attunement, linking it closely with the ‘gaze’ of the infant and the ‘gaze’ of the mother. Adam Phillips in his Fontana Modern Master on Winnicott (page 58) discusses the idea of ‘capacity’ – widely used in Winnicott’s work. Phillips, suggests that ‘capacity carries an…’implication of stored possibility…’ and a ‘…combination of the receptive and the generative (which) blurs the boundary between activity and passivity’. 

This sounds like it could be a description of a moment of leadership – indeed, a leadership moment – in which one both takes something up, and is taken up by it: in leading, one is also following. This is (to me) a very interesting series of associated ideas – including, for example, linking reverie to…:

• An act of faith in the unconscious process
• A response to material
• A capacity for playing with images’ and as a capacity…
• Implying stored possibility, combining the receptive and the generative, and
• A space which blurs the boundary between activity and passivity
• A process of resisting someone who knows from filling the space

And in the discussions of reverie (and analogous concepts like ‘attunement’ and ‘maternal preoccupation’) there seem to be several closely related concepts, closely related in the more or less coherent schemes that in our case Bion, Winnicott and Stern have developed. Such related ideas include reverie (and its equivalents) in contributing to the development of the capacity for…

• tolerating frustration
• experiencing disillusionment
• ‘thinking-for-oneself’
• acting in order to know
• being (conscious) in and of the moment
• exercising economy (of movement and effort)
• collaboration

And how could such an experience of leadership as reverie relate to the capacity for

• action (as opposed to acting out)?
• responsiveness?
• innovation?
• accountability?

And from Winnicott, in particular, there is a link between failures and short comings in ‘maternal preoccupation’ and the development of symptoms (in the child), in so far as failures in the environment create the need to provide what is lacking in some different (proxy) form. So – to stretch out to the far point of our train of thought – there could be a connection between the capacity for reverie (in leadership) and tackling the symptomology of an organisation. Or conversely, the absence of the capacity for reverie (in leadership) in part explains the development of symptoms that take an organisational form. This is one of the dimensions of intimate leadership.