The psychoanalytical intuition and reverie: capturing facts not yet dreamed

This article promotes a dialogue some of Bion's concepts and those of post-Bionian psychoanalysts (Ogden, Ferro, Rocha Barros and Chuster), looking in particular at psychoanalytic intuition, reverie and the alpha function. How can we think about the connection between reverie and intuition? Could the analyst's state of reverie have at its centre - before and beyond the sensuous, in the infra- and ultra-sensuous - the analyst's capacity for intuition? The paper presents a disturbing experience of an analyst in her consulting room, looking at how the concepts work in the clinical material. The clinical material sustains the hypothesis that reverie is an evolution of psychoanalytic intuition, and that intuition occurs between caesuras, which is supported by Bion's proposal of no memory, no desire, no prior understanding, that is, negative capacity.