Learning from Experience

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.