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Pied Beauty: Exploring Psychological Therapists' Inner Experiencing In Pied Beauty: Exploring Psychological Therapists’ Inner Experiencing in Reverie Lynn McVey Submitted in accordance with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Leeds School of Healthcare December, 2017 ii The candidate confirms that the work submitted is her own and that appropriate credit has been given where reference has been made to the work of others. This copy has been supplied on the understanding that it is copyright material and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper acknowledgement. Assertion of moral rights: The right of Lynn McVey to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. © 2017 The University of Leeds and Lynn McVey iii Pied1 Beauty Glory be to God for dappled things – For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow; For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim; Fresh fire-coal chestnut falls; finches’ wings; Landscape plotted and pierced – fold, fallow and plough; And all tradès, their gear and tackle and trim. All things counter, original, spare, strange; Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?) With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim; He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: Praise him. (Manley Hopkins, 2001, p.265). 1 The term ‘pied’ is defined in the Concise Oxford English Dictionary (Soanes & Stevenson, 2008) as ‘having two or more different colours…originally in the sense ‘black and white like a magpie’’ (p.1084). iv Acknowledgements First, I should like to thank the seven therapists who generously took part in this research. My experience of sharing reverie with them has informed and transformed this study, my clinical practice and me, as a person. I am deeply grateful. I want to acknowledge also the inspirational people from whom I have learned about reverie: those whose writings have inspired me and transported me into reverie - especially Wilfred Bion, Thomas Ogden and Robert Romanyshyn - and those with whom I have had the extreme good fortune to work. Among the latter group I thank, in particular, my doctoral supervisors Dr John Lees and Dr Greg Nolan for their wisdom, support and belief in this research; my clinical supervisor, Janet Fitt, for containing me, my clients and our reveries with such care; and my Authentic Movement mentor, Maria Edmondson, who, like all those acknowledged here, not only accepts but also celebrates reverie’s darkness and light: its ‘pied beauty’ (Manley Hopkins, 2001, p.265). Thanks are due also to my friends, especially Josh, who made many helpful suggestions about the research, and Jac, who reviewed the thesis and gave me her invaluable feedback on it as a fellow therapist; to my clients, past and present, with whom I am learning about the awe-inspiring depths of reverie; and to my family, who people my reveries and teach me every day about that which flows beneath it: love. v Abstract Reverie has been defined as an equanimous yet passionate capacity to contain and process the other’s emotional experiencing, taking almost any form. This study responds to a gap for research into this potentially powerful relational phenomenon with UK-based psychological therapists who are not psychoanalysts, by exploring how they experience, use and make sense of reverie and by investigating its potential as a qualitative research tool. Informed by a bricolage of hermeneutic-phenomenological and practitioner-based methodologies, the study investigates reverie with seven qualified therapists working in the UK in a range of modalities. Participants took part in two video- recorded interviews, in the first focusing on reverie in clinical work and in the second reviewing with the researcher clips from the first interview. Video-stills from the interviews (of the researcher only, to protect participants’ anonymity) are used throughout the thesis to illustrate non-verbal aspects of reverie use. The researcher reflected on her own ‘live’ reverie-experiencing in the interviews and encouraged participants to do likewise, and incorporated her reveries within the data analysis also. Analysis revealed eight superordinate themes, grouped in three categories. Paying attention to reverie can offer access to heart-felt relational information so subtle it might otherwise escape attention; information that can be used sensitively to intuit, empathise with and make sense of others’ spoken and unspoken meanings on personal, interpersonal and what may be regarded as transpersonal levels. Such work takes place in the space between consciousness and unconsciousness and between people; a potentially transformative space of ‘pied beauty’ (Manley Hopkins, 2001, p.265), filled with darkness and light, which can facilitate deep, soulful interconnection in therapy and research. Throughout the work readers are invited to enter that space by focusing on their own inner experiencing as they read, thereby gaining a living snapshot of their own reverie. vi Table of Contents Pied Beauty........................................................................................................... iii Acknowledgements .............................................................................................. iv Abstract ................................................................................................................. v Table of Contents ................................................................................................. vi List of Tables ........................................................................................................ ix List of Figures ....................................................................................................... x Chapter 1 Introduction .......................................................................................... 1 1.1 Personal Encounters with Reverie ............................................................ 3 1.1.1 Encountering Reverie in Therapeutic Work ..................................... 4 1.1.2 Encountering Reverie in Research ................................................. 5 1.2 Need for the Research .............................................................................. 6 1.3 Research Question and Aims ................................................................... 8 1.4 Structure of the Thesis .............................................................................. 9 1.5 An Invitation ............................................................................................ 11 Chapter 2 Reverie in the Psychotherapeutic Literature .................................... 13 2.1 Bion’s Concept of Reverie ...................................................................... 14 2.1.1 Alpha-function ............................................................................... 14 2.1.2 Sharing Alpha-function in Reverie ................................................. 16 2.1.3 Becoming ‘O’ ................................................................................ 20 2.2 Post-Bionian Psychodynamic Literature on Reverie ................................ 21 2.2.1 Thomas Ogden’s Reverie ............................................................. 22 2.2.2 The Post-Bionian Field Theorists .................................................. 25 2.2.3 Grotstein’s Projective Transidentification ...................................... 28 2.3 ‘Reverie’ in the Non-Bionian Literature .................................................... 29 2.3.1 ‘Reverie’ and Jung ........................................................................ 29 2.3.2 ‘Reverie’ in the Humanistic Literature ............................................ 32 2.3.3 ‘Reverie’ in the Cognitive Behavioural Literature ........................... 35 2.4 Summary ................................................................................................ 36 Chapter 3 Methodology and Research Design .................................................. 38 3.1 Using Phenomenology to Explore Reverie Experiencing ........................ 38 3.2 Using Practitioner-Based Research to Explore Reverie Use ................... 41 3.3 Using Hermeneutics to Explore Reverie Sense-Making .......................... 43 3.4 Combining Methodologies in a Bricolage ................................................ 44 3.5 Study Design .......................................................................................... 46 vii 3.5.1 Sampling and Recruitment ........................................................... 46 3.5.2 Data Collection ............................................................................. 50 3.5.3 Data Analysis ............................................................................... 52 3.5.4 Assuring Rigour ............................................................................ 58 3.5.5 Addressing Ethical Implications .................................................... 60 3.6 Summary ................................................................................................ 62 Chapter 4 Reflections on Reverie’s ‘Pied Beauty’ ............................................ 64 4.1 ‘Nameless Dread’ and a Doorstep Nightmare ......................................... 66 4.2 A ‘Dark-Light’ Dream of ‘Pied Beauty’..................................................... 69 4.3 Summary ................................................................................................ 71 Chapter 5 Experiencing Reverie .......................................................................
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