A practical psychoanalytic guide to reflexive research: the reverie research method

Abstract

describing the experience at that moment, in the room. This is the work in what Jeanne calls ‘the dark world of not-thinking’ (p. 189), where her existence is not even acknowledged. Gradually there are the first signs that there is a person out there who understands how frightened the patient might feel. Fear begins to be registered; this is an opening, compared to the withdrawal into the shell of not-feeling. During the course of the treatment, Yufang, with Jeanne’s help, gives words to this fear: there is a voice in her head, like ‘a dictator’, ordering her to starve and die. Nine months into the treatment, Yufang is able to talk about the beginning of her illness, how the ‘dictator’ first took hold of her, whereby the cocoon of not living was preferable to facing longstanding inner conflicts and psychic pain. Slowly Yufang lets go of her regression to near death, having acquired, with Jeanne’s help, the internal psychic structure to face life and growth. In the last chapter of the book (chapter eight), Jeanne asks the question with which I started this review: . . . ‘why expose myself to so much lack of love for the self and for me? . . . why have I chosen to work with so much rejection of all that is me?’ (p. 204). In answering this question in the conclusion of the book, Jeanne poignantly refers to her own primitive omnipotence, which keeps infantile feelings at bay. Through her work with these young people, Jeanne achieves a ‘different kind of taming’ (p. 222), not through denial but through an emotional understanding that fosters development and change, in herself and in her patients.