Shuttles to and from the Unconscious: Rêveries, Transformations in Dreaming, and Dreams

I do not think anyone would disagree with the statement that the cornerstone of psychoanalysis is a belief in the existence of the unconscious. The unconscious is conceptualized differently in our three principal reference models. There is Freud's unconscious of 1915, which was correlated with repression, and subsequently expanded in his contributions on splitting of the ego and the mechanisms of defence (1938). Then there is Melanie Klein's view, which concentrates on the deepest layers and invokes an organized mass of unconscious fantasies considered to be present at every moment of our lives. Finally, there is the unconscious as described by Bion and his continuators (Grotstein, 2007, 2009; Ogden, 2005, 2008). I shall now reproduce a long passage from Ogden's 2008 book on account of its clear exposition of certain points that might otherwise remain obscure:

Bion shifted the focus from the symbolic content of thoughts to the process of thinking, and from the symbolic meaning of dreams to the process of dreaming.

For Bion (1962a), «alpha-function» (an as-yet-unknown, and perhaps unknowable, set of mental functions) transforms raw «sense impressions related to emotional experience» (17) into «alpha-elements» that can be linked to form affect-laden dream-thoughts. A dream-thought presents an emotional problem with which the individual must struggle (Bion, 1962a,b; Meltzer, 1983), thus supplying the impetus for the development of the capacity for dreaming (which is synonymous with unconscious thinking). «[Dream-] thoughts require an apparatus to cope with them… Thinking [dreaming] has to be called into existence to cope with [dream-]thoughts» (Bion, 1962b, 110-111). In the absence of alpha-function (either one's own or that provided by another person), one cannot dream and therefore cannot make use of (do unconscious psychological work with) one's lived emotional experience, past and present. Consequently, a person unable to dream is trapped in an endless, unchanging wo