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.
Development
1962
introduced by Wilfred Bion
In Learning from Experience (1962)
2003
developed by Thomas H. Ogden
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.
In On Not Being Able to Dream (2003);Rediscovering Psychoanalysis: Thinking and Dreaming, Learning and Forgetting (2009)
Relations
- 1962 derives from Dream-work
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.
- 2003 developed by Thomas H. Ogden
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.
- 2003 gave rise to Dreaming oneself into existence
Undreamt dreams are experience that alpha function has not been able to transform into material for dreaming.
Works
- 1962
Learning from Experience, published in 1962, is the first of the short theoretical books in which Bion tried to give psychoanalysis an instrument for thinking about thinking. Drawing on his work with psychotic patients and on Freud's account of the two principles of mental functioning, he asks how a person comes to learn from emotional experience, and why some cannot. To keep his terms free of the associations of existing theory, he introduces signs deliberately empty of meaning, chief among them alpha-function, and treats the personality as a set of functions and their factors. Alpha-function works on sense impressions and emotional experiences and turns them into alpha-elements, which can be stored, used in dream thoughts and in unconscious waking thought, and remembered. What is not so transformed remains as beta-elements: undigested facts felt as things in themselves rather than as thoughts, fit only to be evacuated by projective identification or discharged in action. Alpha-elements cohere into a contact barrier that both separates and joins conscious and unconscious, so that one can be awake or asleep, aware or unaware; where alpha-function fails, a screen of beta-elements takes its place, and the person cannot properly dream, and so can neither fall asleep nor fully wake. The function develops in the infant through the mother's capacity for reverie: she takes in the states the infant projects into her, such as a fear of dying, and returns them in a form it can bear, and the infant introjects the function along with them; when she cannot, what returns to the infant is nameless dread. Thinking begins when an expectation meets frustration: an infant who can bear the absence forms a thought of it, while one who cannot treats the absence as a bad object to be got rid of. Bion describes the links between objects as love, hate and knowledge (L, H and K), and makes K — the painful activity of getting to know something, as distinct from possessing knowledge about it — the link on which learning from experience depends; its negative, minus K, strips experience of meaning and is driven by envy. In the later chapters he discusses how the analyst abstracts models from clinical experience and recognises a selected fact that gives coherence to the scattered material of a session, and he abstracts the mother–infant model into the relation of container and contained, which his later books develop.
- 2003
In this paper Ogden addresses the inability to dream, which he distinguishes from simply failing to remember one's dreams. Following Bion, he holds that it is the work of dreaming that creates the differentiation of conscious and unconscious mind, not the reverse; a person who cannot dream therefore cannot generate distinct conscious and unconscious experience, and cannot tell sleeping from waking or dreaming from perceiving. He approaches the problem from three directions: theoretically, through Bion's ideas; through a story by Borges that renders, with unusual artistry, what it is like to be unable to dream; and clinically, through a long analysis in which the patient at first produced a profusion of 'psychic noise' the analyst could not use. Over years this left the analyst deprived of reverie and subject to brief episodes of countertransference psychosis. Ogden discusses two sessions in which the analytic work strengthened the capacity of both patient and analyst for genuine dreaming, in sleep and in reverie.
- 2009
Rediscovering Psychoanalysis: Thinking and Dreaming, Learning and Forgetting
A collection of essays published by Routledge in 2009 in its New Library of Psychoanalysis. Its central idea is that an analyst can develop a style of their own, a living way of practising that grows largely out of their personality and experience, by attending to their own idiosyncratic ways of thinking, feeling and responding to patients. Thomas Ogden approaches this from four vantage points: those of clinician, supervisor, teacher and reader of psychoanalysis. He begins with the creation of psychoanalysis afresh in the session through talking-as-dreaming, then turns to supervising and teaching psychoanalysis in a way unique to each supervisee and each seminar group. The book continues his close readings of seminal analytic works, extending the work of Bion, Loewald and Searles. Its chapters address Bion's clinical seminars and his four principles of mental functioning, a reconception of the Oedipus complex, and the writing of Harold Searles.
See also
Linked from
People
References
- Learning from Experience1962Evidence for a relation
- On Not Being Able to Dream2003Evidence for a relation
- Rediscovering Psychoanalysis: Thinking and Dreaming, Learning and Forgetting2009Evidence for a relation