Reverie and Alpha Function

Towards the end of Chapter Twelve of Learning from Experience, Wilfred R. Bion (1962) asks the following question: “When a mother loves the infant, what does she do it with?” And he replies: “Leaving aside the physical channels of communication my impression is that her love is expressed by reverie” (pp. 35-36). Then he emphasises the link between this reverie and what he calls “alpha function”. According to him, our psychical apparatus cannot directly process the experience of raw reality. The elementary fragments of this experience cannot, for instance, be the object of a thought, give birth to a dream or find a place in memory. As such, these fragments that he calls “beta elements” cannot produce anything. If the psyche is to be able to take possession of them actively and do something with them, they must first be converted into alpha elements. These, on the contrary, can be subject to psychic transformations.

Bion proposes the term “alpha function” to designate the process that makes it possible to transform beta elements that cannot be assimilated by the psyche into alpha elements that can be thought or used in the imaginative world or in dreams. The development of the infant's alpha capacity depends on its mother's capacity for reverie. This capacity enables the mother to receive any psychic object from the infant and to submit it to the process of transformation of

her own alpha function. The result is something that the infant will then be able to make use of in his inner life.

Bion did not go further in elaborating the concept of maternal reverie, but this description and the links that can be established with the analytic situation make it a concept that is rich with echoes. We are quite close here to what D.W. Winnicott called “primary maternal preoccupation”. For him, the expression refers to a particular state of receptiveness, a specific sensibility of the mother to the demands of the infant's inner state. And what he calls the “elaboration in fantasy