Sharing a living room: Empathy, reverie and connection

This paper examines what the originally psychoanalytic concept of reverie can add to non-psychoanalytic practitioners’ understandings of empathy. It uses case material from a study into UK therapists’ experiences of reverie, which centres on a single moment in a session, when an image of her own living room flashed suddenly through a therapist’s mind. Reverie – a capacity to contain the other’s unprocessed emotional experiencing - can offer a magnifying lens through which to view some forms of empathy, revealing the relational, embodied and imaginative materials from which they are constructed. The paper links shared experiencing like that found in reverie with simulative accounts of empathy, but does not claim this enables us to experience exactly what the other feels; rather, when approached sensitively, tentatively and with clients’ needs foremost, it can foster deep connection, enabling us, as it were, to enter others’ inner worlds – perhaps even their living rooms - and make ourselves at home there. Finally, practical ways to work empathically with reverie are suggested, which may interest therapists from a range of modalities, including humanistic approaches.