8 September 1959: α. Cogitations

The inability of the psychotic to ‘digest’ his experience mentally because of his lack of capacity for α contributes to the situation with which most observers are familiar, namely the easy accessibility to the observer of what should be the psychotic's unconscious. These elements remain detectable because the patient cannot make them unconscious. They are therefore also, as I have shown, not available to him because there has been no dream-work-α done to make them unconscious and therefore available to him. He is a man both unable to make these elements unconscious and unable to profit by experience, for profiting by experience means being able to make the material consciously perceived into material that can be mentally stored in such a way that it is susceptible of both concretization and abstraction.

A child learning to walk is engaged in attempting to make conscious material unconscious; only when this is done can it walk. The same is true of every piece of learning ever done – its success depends on the central operations by which dream-work-α is able to transform conscious material into unconscious material suitable for unconscious waking thinking.

The non-psychotic, and the non-psychotic part of the personality, is afraid of making something conscious – the typical neurotic fear in psychoanalysis – because making it conscious is feared as being the same as ‘bringing it out into the open’; this in turn is felt to be the same as evacuating it and making it conscious in such a way that it can never be made unconscious again, and therefore unavailable ever again for unconscious waking thinking. And this in turn is felt to be indistinguishable from being psychotic. This is one of the reasons for the neurotic's fear that successful analysis will make him mad.

The psychotic fears α partly because its operation is felt to bring in the super-ego, and partly because making something unconscious is felt to be equivalent to losing it and consciousness for ever, i.e. death.