You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Defence, a huge and complicated subject, has not been dealt with explicitly by Bion, but rather touched upon by authors who have studied his work. D. Meltzer has particularly concerned himself with the concept of defence in the last chapters of his book, Part III of The Kleinian Development, and in his Bologna lecture-seminars of June 1977.
In view of the many papers to be read at this meeting in a short time, I shall limit myself to the presentation of a few points for discussion, relying upon the intuition of my audience and on what previous speakers have already clarified about Bion's work.
Speaking of defence — mechanisms of defence, operations of defence, defensive organizations and systems — M. Klein's key-concept is unconscious phantasy: elaborate unconscious phantasies used as defence mechanisms (projective identification, splitting, manic mechanisms of expulsion and obsessional mechanisms of controlling) and organized, according to the kind of anxiety and of object mobilizing them, into basic attitudes of mind called paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions.
Bion's key-concept is α-function, which transforms sense impressions (α-elements) into α-elements, which resemble the visual images in dreams stored as memory or used for thinking. Bion is explicit in stating that α-function is an empty concept, to be gradually and cautiously filled with meaning, as has been happening since 1946 with