elements alpha and beta, their destinies
Bion takes Freud [1] The model of a psychic apparatus in which consciousness plays the role of interface, peripheral perception of body in contact with internal reality and external reality.
beta elements are described by Bion as raw sense impressions (from outside), or raw emotional data (from the inside). These impressions, sensations are gross ie they were not treated to be used by the psychic apparatus. Normally, these elements must be converted by beta function alpha alpha elements, which are specific only and therefore thought to be used, handled, assembled by the psychic apparatus. So if the beta elements are impressions or sensations gross alpha elements are themselves the base material of thought. Without them, the thought can occur.
For example, as regards the dream is the transformation of the emotional experience of the dream (beta elements) into "dream thoughts" that will help when the subject wakes up he makes an account of his dream.
"alpha elements include visual images, auditory patterns, patterns of olfactory and they are likely to be employed in the unconscious mind awake, dreams, contact barrier, memory. " [2]
However, if the alpha function is lacking, which may occur in psychosis, the subject matter directly with the beta elements, which are not used to thinking, that is in other words the emotions and impressions of the senses rough. "Contrary to the elements alpha, beta elements are not experienced as phenomena but as things in themselves. " [3] Since the experience of beta-elements within the self gives the feeling of physical presence as a foreign inexpulsable. Hanna Segal also notes that this view "extends the Kleinian point of view according to which children experience hunger as a bad breast inside that must be expelled. " [4]
During the development of small subject, the alpha function is previously performed by the mother. Indeed beta elements will be projected by the subject in the psyche of the mother. The device is to think thoughts of the mother, who by his ability to perform its function alpha beta elements of the Child transforms them into alpha elements that the subject can reintrojections.
addition to access to "think thoughts" that allows this process, the subject comes gradually to introject the mother's alpha function to constitute itself an alpha function independently and no longer dependent on another for transform beta elements.
This alpha function of the mother also covers what Bion called the capacity of maternal reverie. The analyst is called, during the cure, to exercise its capacity for reverie that is the source of his interpretations.
There is therefore in this description with a complex- First, a particular construction of thought-the Kleinian notion of introjection of the good object as making possible the full integration of the self.
Psychosis by Bion
For Bion, the personality is, in all individuals, consisting of some psychotic and nonpsychotic part.
The psychotic part arises from a "cleavage fragments tiny that entire part of the personality that relates to the awareness of internal and external reality, and expulsion of these fragments as they enter their objects or are engulfed by them " [5] .
The psychotic part of personality functioning is defined by a pathological projective identification. She is the psychic mechanism predominates. Out of this operation
pathological projective identification allows the development of communication with others (non-symbolic communication to convey to others what feels the subject), empathy with the object (the self is seen in another person), training symbols, which are factors behind the development of thought processes.
Now there may be failure to establish ties primary communication by projective identification between mother and child. Bion is the essential cause of this failure in an excess of innate hatred and envy of the little child against his mother, who may also be aggravated if the mother is unresponsive. This failure of communication results in all cases the inability to get rid of the subject in a container maternal primitive and violent emotions, which causes the feeling of a disaster that destroyed the original container, having left the child in a state of panic psychosis.
It was before this "nameless dread" absence of an outer container for receiving emotions and objects, the subject tends through the psychotic part of personality to use preferentially the cleavage of these parts are impossible to deport a container.
In this context, the psychotic part of personality has a propensity to use the attack links, which is an avatar of the Freudian death drive as well as a form of cleavage. The binding capacity of the ego (the register of the life instinct and usually done by consciousness), the attention factor (alpha function) and judgments, are defective: the result is a form of self cleavage multiples parties. Chains of thought came from the embryonic non-psychotic part of personality are attacked, and therefore the formation process of thinking is impeded. Formative elements of thoughts that can be juxtaposed, not linked, and the formation of symbols is inhibited.
The subject tries again to get rid of these projection elements unrelated cleaved into smaller parts. This projection is not always as the outer container containing maternal experience of receiving the projections originally made default, it is therefore freely outside. This
are many pieces of me, bits of link parts of the perceptual device, remnants of the superego and of external objects, thus beta elements, which are projected outside the self. Therefore the universe inhabited by the psychotic is formed of multiple pieces of thrown objects and conglomerates that Bion has appointed bizarre objects. In this world, words or images float without limits (since without container), isolated, fragmented or agglomerated as bizarre objects, forming a mental space which is a state of hallucinosis (hallucinosis).
In this state, the sense organs are no longer the perception but the evacuation objects, which produces hallucinations of the psychotic. Similarly, the language has more the function of removing unwanted objects that carry meaning. In hallucinosis, there are no symbols, only representations of concrete things: it is typically in this state that the absent object is not represented by a lack of object (thus symbolized ) but by the presence of a bad object. The hallucinosis radically opposed, in the mode of transformation and psychic functioning predominant thinking is peculiar to non-psychotic personality.
[1] FREUD, S. (1899). The Interpretation of Dreams (Complete Works, Volume IV). Paris: PUF, 2003, Chapter VII, p. 561-677.
[2] BION, WR (1962). Learning from experience. Paris: PUF, 2003, p.43
[3] Ibid . p. 24
[4] SEGAL, H. (1964). Introduction to the Work of Melanie Klein. Paris: PUF, 2000.
[5] BION, WR (1957). "Differentiation of psychotic and nonpsychotic personalities." Second thoughts. Paris, PUF, 2001 51.
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