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.
By setting dreams at the germinal point of nascent thought, Bion has evolved a theory of thinking that implies a pattern of interaction of phenomena which clinical study should either succeed in discovering or, by failing to do so, can then declare the theory to be useless (correct or incorrect not being apposite terms in this field). The central implication of the theory of alpha-function and the Grid is, I would say, this: if an emotional experience is not worked upon by alpha-function so as to evolve alpha-elements (symbols?) which can be used for the formation of dream thoughts, and thus lend itself to digestion as nourishment for the growing mind, the emotional experience must undergo some other process in order to unburden the psychic apparatus of accretions of stimuli. Some of these processes are essentially evacuatory; some simulate digestion but evolve a system of lies which are the poison of the mind and inhibit its growth; others produce a kind of encystment or encapsulating containment and occupy areas of the mental apparatus which thereby becomes unavailable for integration in the growth process. This analogy with the metabolic processes is not employed by Bion as metaphor per se, but rather as a description of the workings of the mental apparatus which has evolved itself, he suggests, on the basis of analogy with the metabolic system.
Let us set aside the third type of process, encystment, to be examined in another context, assuming at the moment that it corresponds to autism. It is rather with the first two, the processes of evacuation and of toxic digestion, that we are concerned, since they bear upon the general theory of dreaming and the psychopathology of the dreaming process. Bion has suggested that if the emotional experience, or, more correctly, the perception of the emotional experience, is not worked upon by alpha-function, its elements tend to remain as disparate bits of psychic stimulation which he has called beta-elements. (One would have t