Somatic Reverie: A Binding Psychotherapeutic Tool?

This book meets a question addressed by Freud and Bion that is now a focus of neuroscience research: the bridging between primary somatic experience and consciousness. It also resonates with the current concern on the factors that can effectively transform detrimental, difficult to reach, encoded internal models; and raises queries upon intersubjective oneiric-transmission of inherited memories.

Somatic Reverie suggests a psychotherapeutic somato-oneiric inner state of intimate right-brain attunement between embodied non-verbal selves; and a transformational process of contiguous experiencing, whereby the psychotherapist viscerally feels the patient’s raw emotions, and reaches an intense synchronized coupling of affective consciousness. This primary intersubjective bonding enhances a sense of personal Self as it unfolds from a grounding somatic landmark, out of which revealing emerging imagery, shared psychic perspective, and poetic consciousness evolve.

Narrative of psychotherapeutic processes with child and adult patients describe how somatic reverie has evolved over three decades; is used in a variety of clinical and cross-cultural interventions; and is awakened in our trainees, as a shared opening up in our field of experiencing where the widening scope of perception, consciousness, and thought becomes a generative process of connecting aliveness, growth, and realization.