Concept
Alpha function
Bion's deliberately empty name for the mental function that turns raw sense impressions and emotional experience into alpha elements, which can be stored as memory and used in dreaming and thinking. Where it fails, experience stays as unprocessed beta elements that can only be evacuated. It first develops in the infant through the mother's capacity to take in and transform the infant's states.
- Narrower concepts
- Dreaming oneself into existence
- Introduced by
- Wilfred Bion
- Key works
- 3
introduced by
- Wilfred Bion 1962
derives from
- Dream-work 1962 Bion modelled alpha function on dreaming: it is the function that makes the 'dream' possible, and the alpha-elements it produces resemble, or may be identical with, the visual images of dreams that Freud's interpretation resolves into their latent content.
developed by
- Thomas H. Ogden 2003 Following Bion, Ogden treats dreaming as the work that alpha function makes possible, in waking as in sleep. He builds his clinical idea of undreamt dreams on the failure of that work.