Chapter 20. Learning from Experience

1 When evacuation of a bad breast is felt to lead to its presence externally, if the evacuation is achieved, apparently by sucking at a real breast, the aftermath of the evacuation is not painful as in the respiratory and other methods. This stimulates interaction between the reality and pleasure-pain principles. We may follow up (1) the process of differentiation of the representation from the corresponding realization, the process by which the thing-in-itself is distinguishable from the idea (Bradley, 1.148) or (2) the effects of the correspondence between alimentation and thinking. The first course leads directly to a discussion of the importance of abstraction, which may, in this context, be regarded as an aspect of the transformation, by alpha-function, of an emotional experience into alpha-elements.

2 The Kleinian theory that the infant feels it has evacuated its bad object into the breast, combined with the theory that satisfaction of a need can be felt as evacuation of a need (the need itself being a bad breast – to employ concrete terms – or what I have called a beta-element – to employ an abstraction) represents an infant's feeling that the breast in actuality is an evacuated object and therefore indistinguishable from a beta-element. Something must happen now if the child is to continue feeding. It is implied in the process I have described that the situation cannot be recognized as objective. If there is a good breast, a sweet object, it is because it has been evacuated, produced; and the same with the bad breast, the needed breast, the bitter breast, etc. It cannot be seen as objective and it cannot be seen as subjective. From these sweet, bitter, sour objects, sweetness, bitterness, sourness, are abstracted. Once abstracted they can be reapplied the abstraction made can be used in situations where a realization, not the original realization from which it was abstracted, approximates to

it. For example an emotional experience is associated with the br