Therapist memory and reverie: implications for the clinical setting

ABSTRACT

In this work, the author considers reveries to be ‘dream-like-memories’. In the course of a session they appear as proto-memory – the therapist’s early traumatic object relations that are recorded in the unconscious at an almost bodily level (a type of unthought known) and which are resurrected between therapist and patient when a similar traumatic subject arises between them. The therapist’s reveries are recollections in the form of dream-like allusions to his past experience. A clinical vignette from the psychotherapy of a child whose father suffered from PTSD (following a wartime experience in Afghanistan and Iraq) is discussed. Dissociative dynamics were repeated in the therapeutic relationship, in the form of an obsessive game intending to preserve the state in which there was no need to remember what had been unconsciously transmitted to the child: his father’s wartime experience. The projection of the primary elements which had been silenced evoked in the therapist allusions to his unconscious identification with his ancestor’s post-traumatic experiences. These allusions helped in overcoming the dissociated state. The role of memory in child psychotherapists’ receptivity of trauma is revisited.

KEYWORDS:

• Intergenerational transmission
• combatant trauma
• therapist’s memory
• reverie
• Bion

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Yaakov Roitman

Yaakov Roitman, PhD, is a clinical psychologist and supervisor at the Association for Children at Risk and supervisor at the Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Programme at the ‘Barzilai’ University Hospital, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer-Sheba, Israel.