Reverie as reflexivity

Although diversity categories enable academics to reflect on relationships and power inequities during the research process, psychosocial scholars argue that they also run the risk of homogenising and constraining our understanding of the other. The chapter employs the radical psychoanalytical principles of Reverie by Wilfred Bion (1962) to develop an approach more attuned to affect in the provision of reflexivity. Drawing on the accounts given by men and women executives and non-executives in accounting and finance, the chapter explains how reverie can alert scholars to the role that affect plays in shaping the direction of an unfolding dialogue, the establishment of affinities, and the presence of unconscious relational forms. The chapter makes a methodological contribution by tracing how the pragmatic imbrication of a specific aspect of psychoanalysis can offer hope to scholars wishing to move beyond the confines of diversity categories, as a way to begin to know their research participants.