Mindlessness: Failure and Reversal of Alpha-Function as a Model for Relating Psychosomatics, Hyperactivity and Hallucinosis

By naming the mysterious function of symbol-formation and leaving it ‘empty’, alpha-function, as essentially unobservable, Bion has laid the groundwork of a model which divides the functioning of the mind into two great areas. While these have a certain resemblance to Freud's distinction between systems conscious and unconscious, and thus between primary and secondary mental processes, it has a different emphasis. It stresses the movement from disorder to order rather than from excitation to quiescence. Freud's model, under the later structural theory, envisages the ego's role as being directed towards the evacuation of excitation within the boundaries acceptable to superego and external world authorities. In Bion's model the self, with the aid of primal internal objects (the thinking breast), seeks to bind the emotional experience through alpha function, to create thereby the symbols which make dream-thoughts possible as the foundation for rational thinking processes, including the transformation into language. Memory, as a constructive process (Schilder), is thus made available as a mental function, contrasting with recall as a neurophysiological one (computer function).

But Bion's model goes further in its complexity and provides us with a basis for describing and relating a wide range of phenomena which, taken together, may reasonably be described as mindless, protomental (Experiences in Groups) or soma-psychotic (A Memoir of the Future). By adding to the concept Beta-elements the puzzling one of Beta-elements-with-traces-of-ego-and-superego (products of the reversal of alpha-function) he has constructed a model which allows for a wide differentation of degrees of fragmentation. In this paper I will try to differentiate three different levels of fragmentation of the emotional experience and the different modes of evacuation from the mental apparatus to which they lend themselves.