The eigenstate problem of the Jaynes–Cummings model on the basis of a complete Hamiltonian, including the centre-of-mass kinetic energy operator, is considered. The energy spectrum and wavefunctions in the standing-wave (SW) and counterpropagating-wave (CPW) cases are calculated and compared with each other. It is shown that in the CPW case: (i) the atomic momentum distribution is asymmetric; (ii) the concept of quasimomentum is not applicable and instead the problem concerns the ordinary momentum; (iii) atomic and photonic state distributions are self-consistent; and as a consequence (iv) the mean number of photons in counterpropagating travelling waves and mean atomic momentum are matched. Explicit analytic expressions are proposed to describe the transition from counterpropagating quantized waves to a standing wave. It is also shown that, if the recoil energy is taken into account, the Doppleron resonance is split into two branches, one of which diverges to Bragg-like resonance in high-order range.