düşüncenin gelişimi ve stabilizasyon süreçleri*

The author addresses, from a psychoanalytical point of view, the issue of the growth of thinking. After a brief outline of Freud's and Melanie Klein's hypotheses in that field, he unfolds the theory of thinking developed by Wilfred Bion, based on the concept of projective identification conceived as a primitive mode of communication between infant and mother: the primitive bodily experiences (beta elements) of the infant are projected on to the mother who has the function to receive and transform theses projections into new elements (alpha elements) that the infant's psyche is able to process. Those elements give meaning to the primitive bodily experiences of the baby. The actual thoughts emerge in his/her mind when the infant is able to bear the frustration of the absence of his/her mother. He is now able to extract invariant shapes from his/her previous experiences and to apply those invariant shapes to the current situation. In terms of the current scientific models that theory could be interpreted in terms of emerging properties and structural stability. An extract of the psychoanalysis of a borderline adult patient illustrates that theory and its application to the analytic process.