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In her paper “Towards learning from experience in infancy and chidhood”, Martha Harris stresses the limitations of the psychoanalytic understanding of the means by which qualities of the object become introjected into the structure of the personality:
Introjection remains a mysterious process: how do involvement and reliance upon objects in the external world which are apprehended by the senses (and, as Wilfred Bion has pointed out, described in language which has been evolved to deal with external reality), become assimilated and transformed in the mind into what he calls “psychoanalytic objects” which can contribute to the growth of the personality: This is a process about which we have almost everything to learn. [1978; Harris, 1987c, p. 168]
However, one of the ways we can learn how it happens—even if not why it happens—is by observing how symbols are formed in art and poetry. Although Bion said that alpha-function was unobservable, it is possible to observe the evolution of poetic symbols through the close analysis of poetic diction. In this way, tracing the