The engine of transformations1
I visited Sarajevo several years ago and stood on the famous Latin Bridge, now modernized and quite ordinary, where Archduke Ferdinand and his wife were shot dead by a Bosnian Serb assassin; an event that lit the fuse for the horrendous conflagration of World War I. Just around the corner from the bridge was a souvenir shop in which tourists could have their picture taken while sitting in a cardboard replica of the Archduke's open-air limousine; cheerful faces inserted into the cut-out photographs of the two assassination victims. There was a sense of manic excitement at the opportunity to be photographed as the royal couple, yet to survive and email that picture home, sanitized of any recognition that these murders unleashed an unprecedented degree of barbarous violence.
However, on other streets one could discover the “Sarajevo Roses,” created from the small pockets that were gouged out of the pavement by thousands of bombshells that rained down from the city’s surrounding hills during the four-year siege in the 1990s. The shells left imprints that resembled macabre flowers and some of these were filled in and painted red to commemorate the fallen citizens. Walking through the city, you would come upon these and feel intensely solemn as though stepping on holy ground; the red “petals” of the roses as painful reminders that the blood of innocents was splattered where you were standing. There were neither antiseptic tourist sites here nor surreal photo ops; instead there was the arresting chill at knowing that someone was blown to pieces where you stood.
I was reminded of these two images from Sarajevo’s war torn past when thinking about Bion’s (1962a, 1962b, 1992) discovery of alpha function upon which the psyche depends in order to make psychological meaning of raw emotional facts so that we may learn from experience. When the emotional truth of what we must endure in order to develop personally is too great, that truth may be trivialized and transformed into a thrilling sideshow attraction that sweeps away awareness of the 15 million soldiers who perished in World War I. But how are we to memorialize horrific trauma in a manner that conveys to the observer something true about the nightmarish event yet evoking a tolerable “taste” of that unbearable tragedy, i.e., the “Sarajevo Roses,” to stimulate reflection and promote emotional growth?
This paper traces the development of Bion’s theory of thinking and explores the various trends in his personal and psychoanalytic experiences that contributed to the discovery of alpha function which, in my view, was his greatest achievement. I have come to regard his proposal of alpha function, formulated during an especially fertile period of approximately two years from 1958 through 1960, as the culmination of several seemingly disconnected facets of his life all of which had to do with how the mind may process unthinkably painful feelings. I argue that his articulation of alpha function was the final common pathway of three areas of “research” that Bion simultaneously had undertaken: (1) the immensely personal and riveting (Bion, 1997) account of the 1918 Battle of Amiens written between 1958 and 1960; (2) the seemingly “scientific” elaboration of the theory of alpha function (Bion, 1992) detailed in Cogitations from 1959 through 1960; and (3) the winding down of what Hinshelwood (2011) has called the second major phase of Bion’s work, the papers on schizophrenia during the 1950s. In addition, in my view Bion’s marriage to Francesca in 1951 served an essential and invaluable role that provided him the necessary containment in order to confront the demons from his own traumatized past as well as those in his psychotic patients, which eventuated in his proposing alpha function.
There has been a growing recognition in recent years that Bion’s World War I traumatic experiences have been a hidden order in his published psychoanalytic writings (Roper, 2009, in press; Souter, 2009; Symington & Symington, 1996; Szykierski, 2010). The theme of war and references to the military became apparent to me as an organizing motif beginning in Bion’s first publication in 1940, “The ‘war of nerves’: Civilian reaction, morale and prophylaxis,” and continuing through his last (1979/1994) article nearly 40 years later, “Making the best of a bad job,” 2in which we are witness to his awareness of disrupted thinking while under fire, either in the cacophony of battle or in the analyst’s consulting room “When two personalities meet, [and] an emotional storm is created” (p. 321). The individual soldier, whether infantryman or officer, is subjected to a “war of nerves” and that the
object of the combatant is to exploit unconscious phantasies, both in the enemy and in himself, in such a way that the enemy is discomfited and he himself benefited.
(Bion, 1940, p. 180)
Later (1958–1960/1997), in recounting his mental state during the 1918 Battle of Amiens in which he was a 20-year-old tank commander, Bion writes “Bion felt sick. He wanted to think ... He tried to think ... He tried to think” (p. 254). 3 In his final paper, Bion (1979) likens the encounter with some patients to combat:
In war the enemy’s object is to terrify you that you cannot think clearly, while your object is to continue to think clearly no matter how adverse or frightening the situation.
(p. 322)
As if to remind us that his World War I experiences have not faded from memory, it is striking to me that he closes “Making the best of a bad job” with his final published sentence, “That war has not ceased yet” (p. 331).
There is a curious divide between Bion’s personal journals (1982, 1985, 1990, 1997a), published after his death in which his encounters in battle are described in often gruesome terms, and his “professional” writings, which make only oblique mention of these experiences, if at all. Nevertheless, it was Francesca Bion (1997) herself who succinctly stated that Bion’s war actions “all formed part of the real personal emotional experience on which his theories lie” (p. 311). Two recent papers by Szykierski (2010) and Souter (2009) offer close readings of Bion’s accounts of World War I in his diaries, especially the Battle of Amiens, and convincingly link these to his theory of the container/contained (Szykierski) and to “the horrors of psychic abandonment” (Souter, p. 795). In other writings, I (Brown, 2005, 2006, 2011a) have suggested that Bion’s (1957) notion of the psychotic part of the personality may also derive from his military exploits in which he was exposed to the structure of split-off parts of the self in severely traumatized individuals. 4
In preparing to write this paper, I became aware of a period for over a year from 1959 through 1960 during which Bion’s ideas about alpha function slowly evolved through a long series of entries in Cogitations (Bion, 1992) and wondered whether this intense focus might have been associated with some important events in his concurrent life. I learned (Tarantelli, 2011) that this was the same period in which Bion was engaged in writing his Amiens memoir; thus, it became clear that Bion’s development of alpha function was partly stimulated by his work on the war recollection and that this autobiographical writing in turn was fostered by his growing understanding of the processes involved in alpha function; that these two synchronous endeavors enabled each other. 5 Just as Isaac Newton had to invent calculus in order to study planetary movement, so Bion formulated alpha function, which gave him the tools to understand psychotic thinking as well as to assist in working through his World War I trauma.
Bion began writing the Amiens diary in 1958 after he and Francesca visited the site of that battle and stopped, mid-sentence, in 1960. Francesca Bion (1997) attributes this stoppage to “other more pressing commitments [that] intervened. He was working on Learning from Experience at the time” (p. 214). During this period, we can trace in Cogitations an especially creative time beginning in July, 1959, and ending at some point in 1960 6in which he formulated his theory of dreaming and alpha function. I suggest that Learning from Experience (1962b) was the capstone of these two simultaneous projects (writing the diary and formulating the theory of dreaming/alpha function) which extended some implicit concepts in his schizophrenia papers and were nurtured in the embrace of an emotionally safe, replenishing marriage.
Bion met Francesca in 1951 and after a short courtship they were married several months later. 7From the outset there was something remarkable about their deep emotional connection that provided Bion an experience of what he would later call containment, which permitted him to emotionally revisit his traumatic World War I horrors that had remained fallow for more than 30 years and had left “an abiding impression of unrelieved gloom and profound dislike of himself” (F. Bion, 1985, p. 6). This “unrelieved gloom” most likely was a conglomerate of past trauma that had been fused together into a bleak amalgam that remained unmetabolized: the death in childbirth of his first wife while he was on assignment in World War II; the scars from his immersion in the daily deadly horrors of World War I; and a feeling about his own childhood as expressed by the following:
How people can think of childhood as ‘happy’ I do not know. A horrible bogey-ridden, demon-haunted time it was to me and then one has not the fortitude, or callosities, with which to deal with it.
(1985, p. 76)
Bion must have sensed in his future wife a remarkable capacity for understanding and tolerating his despair, a woman who had enabled “a renaissance she had brought about in his life” (Bleandonu, 1994, p. 102) at a time when he felt emotionally deadened. This awakening had partly to do with the freedom he felt to share his World War I affective scars with Francesca in a letter to her shortly after their first date (Bion, 1985) in which he spoke movingly about his experiences in battle that he had not recounted since writing his earlier memoirs in 1917–1919. This initial encounter contrasted with his preliminary analytic meeting with Melanie Klein who “did not understand, or chose not to know – the enormous significance of the DSO8 ... [that felt like] a cosmetic cover for my cowardice” (1985, p. 67). In addition, Bion had found the challenge of raising his infant daughter, Parthenope, on his own after the death of his first wife to be very daunting and believed “I had lost my child” (1985, p. 70) because he was “numbed and insensitive” (p. 70) to her needs. This anesthetized state also papered over his profound guilt that he had “begged Betty [his first wife] to agree to have a baby; her agreement to do so had cost her her life” (p. 70) when she died shortly after Pathenope’s birth.
Francesca was “a miracle that has happened to me” (1985, p. 82), who had drawn him out from his somnambulistic existence and had “given Parthenope back to me and made me feel what it is like to have a child” (p. 85). In a letter to Francesca, Bion also wrote that “I felt so happy when you spoke of a nursery” (p. 85); a happiness that must have felt an especially joyous release from his gloom because of Francesca’s eagerness in contrast to his pressuring Betty to become a mother that “had cost her her life.” I also believe that the safe comfort in his marriage provided Bion with the necessary emotional grounding to tolerate the stresses in analyzing psychotics and also taught him about the need for the psyche under extreme pressure to have another available mind to help carry the affective burden. Thus, his papers on schizophrenic thought in the 1950s were partly sponsored by the “background of safety” (Sandler, 1960) of a loving marriage; an on-going presence of emotional stability that enabled Bion in 1958 to literally return to the physical site of the Battle of Amiens as well as to revisit the painful memories in writing that memoir 9 .
With regard to Bion’s work in Cogitations, we see in this span of approximately one year (1959–1960) his gradual departure from Freud’s (1900) theory of dreaming that dealt with how dreams conceal instinctual wishes in order to achieve wish-fulfillment to Bion’s development of his ideas about the function of dreams in the service of making sense of reality. I believe that Bion’s expansion in Cogitations of Freud’s theory of dream-work that eventuated in the proposition of alpha function ought to be considered as one of psychoanalysis’ greatest advancements because of the profound implications this holds for theoretical and clinical analysis. The notion that we are constantly dreaming while awake and asleep to transform the emotional reality of experience redefined how we view the analyst’s subjective experiences as his/her unconscious processing of the patient’s unconscious communicated affects. Where Freud viewed dreams as operating in the service of the pleasure principle (Freud, 1911b), Bion offered an additional perspective that emphasized the importance of the reality principle . Freud considered disguise as the main role of dream-work and Bion used the same term (dream-work) to describe an additional function of the dream as a “mental digestive process” (1992, undated, p. 42). Bion asserted that conscious experience must be subjected to dream-work in order for it to become personalized: conscious experience remains an “undigested fact” until it is processed by dream-work and turned into a memory that may be linked with other memories in an individual’s self-narrative. Thus, Bion accorded to dream-work a central role in one’s capacity for dealing with conscious experience, thereby broadening the “domain of the dream” (p. 45) to include the notion that dream-work also performs its function while we are awake:
Freud says Aristotle states that a dream is the way that a mind works in sleep: I say it is the way it works when awake.
(p. 43) [italics in original]
At about the same time Bion was framing in Cogitations this new view of dreaming, he was also facing the emotional reality of his war trauma through writing in the Amiens diary. Bion (1917–1919/1997a) had previously written to his parents after the war about his experiences but left this reflective chronicling aside and the traumatic facts were “carried over almost unchewed and apparently undigested” (F. Bion, 1997, p. 309) until he returned to them 40 years after the events. Bion (1997a) recounts an episode the night before the deciding battle in which he and his companion, Asser, each had restless nights with bad dreams, stating that
one gets the most appalling dreams, and then when you wake up you don’t know whether it wouldn’t have been better to go on sleeping. The dreams are much nicer than the actual reality we have to face now.
(p. 236)
One has the impression of hearing about a mind that is struggling to dream a horror that cannot be dreamed in the sense of turning it into a memory that may perhaps be repressed; the boundaries between wakefulness and sleep are blurred and “the most appalling dreams ... are much nicer than the actual reality.” Bion has a firsthand sampling of the unending mental agony that can result when dream-work not only fails to disguise (in the Freudian sense) but also is unable to function at all.
Bion’s experiences also taught him about the importance of dreaming in the ability to distinguish between reality and phantasy. Endless bombardment and the deafening roar of battle resulted in sleep deprivation so that even though one might manage to sleep “when you awoke you wondered whether you were dreaming” (Bion, 1997a, p. 94). 10 Thus, it was difficult to see how Freud’s wish-fulfillment theory of dreams applied to combat situations “when the most appalling dreams ... are much nicer than actual reality.” In normal situations, the “digestive” function of dreams allows the individual to metabolize experience by “dreaming” it, but when an overwhelming reality disables (Bion’s version of) dreamwork the “emotion-recording apparatus” of which Graves (1929) spoke fails and reality becomes an interchangeable nightmare with phantasy.
It seems to me that this entry in the Amiens diary that describes the failure to dream leads in Cogitations to explore the psychic danger of inoperative dream-work and, in a kind of Mobius strip, Bion’s ability to theorize about the functions of dream-work circles back to enable him to continue the emotional work in the diary. When dream-work is attacked, Bion states in Cogitations, there is a subjective sense of being dead and what should have been given meaning instead is felt as lifeless. In this connection, being dead may be more appealing than being alive; that is, it can be preferable not to be able to feel than to have to endure unbearable pain as he vividly expresses in Amiens:
I wish I was a dummy stuffed with straw now. Unfortunately, if I’m hit it hurts and I hate being hurt. I don’t think anybody knows how afraid I am of physical pain. If I could be sure that I should be killed, I don’t think I would mind, but the ghastly and terrible thing, the awful thought of one’s shins crumbling up inside one’s legs at the burst of shells and the flying splinters, is more than I can stand.
(1997a, p. 240)
In contrast to the failure of dream-work and the feeling of being dead, Bion states in Cogitations that “the true dream is felt as life promoting” (p. 67) [italics in original] and one can detect in the quote of being an unfeeling dummy an empathy for those who are unable to manage reality and must resort to dismantling dream-work in order to survive. Bion (1982) himself knew this when he said about the Battle of Amiens, “Oh yes, I died on August 8th 1918” (p. 265).
Beginning in early 1960, Bion’s Cogitations entries took an important step forward by drawing a distinction between Freud’s definition of dream-work and his own concept of dream-work-α. Freud’s dream-work addressed how an unconscious wish was masqueraded to hide its true nature from the censor so it could achieve partial satisfaction and was related to dream interpretation, i.e., detecting the camouflaged hidden wish. Bion’s dream-work-α denotes the capacity to dream, which rests upon the ability of dream-work-α to transform undigested facts into dream thoughts ( α elements ) that may be linked together in a dream narrative. From a clinical point of view, the analyst may be neglecting an important factor if he insists only on interpreting the dream from a Freudian axis: the patient may be unable to dream dreams that are “life promoting” and if this is the case then the treatment focus must redirect its efforts away from interpretations that assume the existence of a symbolic (dream-work-α) capacity. Sometime later Bion replaced dream-work-α with simply alpha function, therefore breaking further with Freud’s pleasure principle derived theory and establishing his own viewpoint that emphasized the dream’s function in service of the reality principle – i.e., the dream as a mental digestive process that operated while we are asleep and also while awake. However, Bion did not reject Freud’s theory of dreaming, but instead offered an additional perspective.
It seems appropriate at this point to consider some aspects of the psychoanalytic understanding of war neuroses 11 at the end of World War I to contextualize Bion’s later formulations about the effects of battle upon alpha function. Many considered the war neuroses to represent a challenge to Freud’s sexual etiological theory of the neuroses and this question was discussed at a Symposium held at the Fifth Psycho-Analytical Congress in Budapest in September, 1918, just two months before the armistice, at which Freud gave an introduction to papers by Ferenczi, Abraham, Jones and Ernst Simmel. Abraham’s (1921) statement that “the war neuroses are not to be understood without taking the sexuality into consideration” (p. 20) captured the prevailing view that contemporary analysts might find somewhat pejorative. The psychosexual issue arose mainly in response to the question of why some soldiers fell ill while others did not, and this was typically considered from a vertex of preexisting susceptibility to breakdown resulting from childhood conflicts, often around passive homosexual longings:
Many of the patients show themselves as completely female-passive in their surrender to their suffering.
(Abraham, 1921, p. 18)
Little attention was paid in these reports either to the ferocity of battle and the nightmarish realities of the war front or to the possibility that “regressive” cries for mother by injured infantrymen were desperate pleas for comfort from their anguish. Jones (1921), however, emphasized the instinctual need to survive more than the sexual instincts per se:
but that in war the conflict between the instinct for self-preservation and the ego-ideal [not to kill] is enough to lead to a neurosis.
(p. 41)
Finally, regarding the repetitive traumatic dreams of the servicemen, Ferenczi (1921) importantly noted that these terrors may be “spontaneous attempts at cure on the part of the patient” (p. 15) accomplished through abreaction.
I think this last comment by Ferenczi links very directly with Bion’s attempts in the 1950s to understand the psychological mechanisms that must be in place in order to withstand and mentally “digest” overwhelming emotional experience, whether arising internally or invading the psyche from external sources as in war. As early as 1940 in his first paper, “The ‘war of nerves,’” Bion was attuned to the primary interpersonal importance of belonging to a group during the war as a potential bulwark against becoming traumatized. 12 Just after the Budapest conference, Freud (1920) proposed the concept of a Reizschutz, or “protective shield,” a neurophysiologically conceived rind buffering the psyche to protect it from “any excitations from outside which are powerful enough to break through the protective shield” (p. 29) and therefore cause trauma. Current thinking is that this shield is constructed from internalized object relations. For example, Khan (1963) considered the internalized mother functioning as an auxiliary ego to be a prime component of this shield, while others have likened it to a membrane which enfolds the ego as a kind of ‘second skin’ (Anzieu, 1993; Bick, 1968, 1986) or what Gerzi (2005) has termed a ‘narcissistic envelope.’ In other publications (Brown, 2005, 2006, 2011a), I have extended the definition of the protective shield to include those internal objects, such as the container/contained relationship 13, as well as the capacity to dream, which operate to abate and metabolize excessive “excitations from outside” (or emerging from internal sources). Unlike Ferenczi, I think Bion would see the repetitive traumatic dream as a failure to digest frightening experience, i. e., an evacuation of unmanageable raw emotion, and not a “true dream ... [that] “is felt as life promoting” (Bion, 1992, p. 67). Nevertheless, Bion, like Ferenczi, was struggling to understand how the mind contends with terrifying phenomena that threaten to disassemble the psyche’s protective shield.
Nowhere is this “war of nerves” more prominent than in Bion’s (1997a) description of his entrapment in a shell-hole during the battle of Amiens 14 with his young runner, whom he calls Sweeting. It illustrates not only the sheer horror of war, but also Bion’s attempts to think in the midst of overwhelming sensory bombardment and his ultimate failure to do so. The pair had taken shelter from the German attack with Sweeting holding close to Bion when the runner asked, “Why can’t I cough, why can’t I cough, sir?”
Bion turned round and looked at Sweeting’s side, and there he saw gusts of steam coming from where his left side should be. A shell splinter had torn out the left side of his chest. There was no lung left there. Leaning back in the shell-hole, Bion began to vomit unrestrainedly, helplessly.
(p. 255)
Sweeting started incessantly to beg Bion to be sure to write to his mother and these appeals appeared to grate on Bion’s already frayed nerves: “‘Oh, for Christ’s sake shut up’, shouted Bion, revolted and terrified” (p. 255). Then, later, “I wish he would shut up. I wish he would die. Why can’t he die?” (p. 256).
I would like to suggest that the episode of Sweeting’s horrific injury and his panicked, desperate entreaties for Bion to contact the boy’s mother confronted Bion with an overwhelming in vivo experience from which he learned about the nature of alpha function and its limitations. The incident is described in vivid sensorial language and begins with the German artillery barrage:
At first all was a silent fiery curtain, and then came the sound, a rushing, pulsating sound which came in gusts against the skin of face and hands as well as ears.
(1997, p. 252)
In the shell-hole with Sweeting, the drumming din of the explosions blended together with the boy’s begging to create a composite sensory missile that crashed through Bion’s protective shield: “never have I know such a bombardment like this” (p. 256). This “bombardment” by sensory fragments reduced Bion to vomiting in order to evacuate the sensory overload and must also have taught him, in retrospect, how the desperate mind madly discharges experience that cannot be abstracted. Perhaps, as well, surviving this showering fusillade of shell splinters served as a template for Bion’s (1957/1967a) description of the psychotic state of mind when he said “the patient feels surrounded by minute links which, being impregnated now with cruelty, link objects together cruelly” (p. 50).
Writing in Cogitations before he introduced the concept of alpha function, Bion observed the link between dreaming and introjection: that conscious, sensory experience must first be introjected in order for dream-work to process the raw emotional material. Bion (1958) had earlier described in the paper “On arrogance” how a patient projects into the analyst who then must introject the projection and permit it to “sojourn” in the analyst’s psyche and we can see in the Sweeting incident Bion’s inability to tolerate his runner’s agony. It is too much to bear the “bombardment” of the admixture of Sweeting’s horrible injury, the “gusts of steam” billowing out of his side, with the noise of the German barrage: these stay as sensory events that overload Bion’s alpha function and his mind can only expel (vomit out) these unmanageable experiences.
It seems likely to me that Sweeting’s insistent appeals to Bion to contact his mother, as well as hearing dying soldiers call for their mothers on the battlefield, made Bion aware of a mother’s central role in helping her child manage emotional pain; an awareness that was later realized in his marriage to Francesca. This brings us to the threshold of Bion’s introduction of his model of the container/contained that was proposed after the creative period discussed here between 1958 and 1960 when he wrote the Amiens diary and developed the theory of alpha function in Cogitations, which extended in new and important ways ideas that were implicit in his papers on schizophrenic thinking.
Before moving on to an exploration of the container/contained conception, I would like to offer a speculation about Bion ending the Amiens diary in mid-sentence. Bion and another officer were speaking about someone who had “cracked up” under pressure and the officer commented that Bion showed no signs of this, to which Bion (1997a) writes
Bion did not believe him. He felt that people who cracked up were merely those who did not allow the rest of the world to ...
(p. 308)
Francesca Bion (1997) believes that “other more pressing commitments intervened” (p. 214) such as his work on Learning from Experience . Szykierski (2010) writes
it reads as though Bion were about to formulate the great unknown of mental catastrophe, but could not find the words, and went on an intellectual journey to find the elements and factors determining the transformations that determine whether a mind will learn from experience or “crack up.
(p. 959) [italics in original]
Souter (2009) questions whether we should even attempt to complete this sentence because it would be an artificial closure and that
it seems wrong to conventionalize this final utterance into collected prose, to demand that the bloodied gap be closed.
(p. 806)
Each of these opinions has important merit and, from a close reading of his entries in Cogitations written during the same period (1958–1960) in which he wrote the Amiens diary, it seems more than coincidental to me that he would end the diary at the same time his speculations in Cogitations led him to introduce the concept of alpha function (in 1960). This formulation also signaled Bion’s amending of Freud’s theory of dreaming (by emphasizing that the processes of dreaming are also active while one is awake) and represents a quantum step forward in his independence as a psychoanalytic thinker. Therefore, Bion’s discovery of alpha function was a milestone reached by having traveled the dual carriageway of the Amiens dairy and Cogitations, an achievement opening up new creative avenues that led to crafting the invaluable theories of thinking, the container and the contained, etc., that began with Learning from Experience in 1962 and which I view as a coalescence [a kind of selected fact] of these earlier threads into an impressive new pattern. It may be that he stopped writing in the diary because he suddenly realized that he had “found the words ... [to continue] on an intellectual journey” (Szykierski, ibid) and those words were “alpha function.”
Although Bion’s concepts of alpha function and the container/contained relationship are usually linked together, it is important to note that his articulation of alpha function preceded the development of the theory of container and contained. I consider alpha function a part of the unconscious ego (Brown, 2009a, 2011a) by which affective experience is transformed from its sensory roots to an emotional experience that is also a thought or, put another way, from existing as an undigested fact to becoming a memory. “Alpha function” describes the psychic process by which this transformation occurs and also the agency that performs the operation. We have seen how Bion’s ideas about alpha function slowly evolved as a means by which to understand his clinical experiences with psychotics as well as a tool to assist him in coming to terms with his World War I trauma. Alpha function has its theoretical roots in Freud’s (1900) concept of dream-work, which Bion then built upon to create a distinctly unique and original proposition. Though we have traced the arc of Bion’s thinking that brought him to theorize alpha function, the question still remains of how this capacity forms in the individual psyche and this query brings us to Bion’s formulation of the container and the contained.
I suggest that while Bion’s working through his World War I trauma by writing in the Amiens diary and in Cogitations largely addressed the “emotion-recording apparatus [that] seems to have failed” (Graves, 1929) in the tumultuous roar of battle (alpha function), that his marriage to Francesca Bion as well his clinical work with psychotic patients in the 1950s contributed significantly to his understanding the kind of relationship with another person that is required to be able to think under fire, i.e., his theory of container and contained. Szykierski (2010) links Bion’s use of the word “containment” with its military implication, as in “containing” the enemy, and sees its roots in his war experiences. Though this connection seems very relevant, as in Bion’s inability to “contain” Sweeting’s terror (if, in fact, such horror can be bearably contained at all), I think his experiences in the intimacy of a satisfying marriage and in the difficult closeness of analytic work with psychotics taught him more about the vital importance of containment than the chaos of the battlefield. We can see the kernels of ideas in his psychoanalytic writings in the 1950s on schizophrenic thought that would eventually lead him to propose the theory of container and contained.
Bion seems to have used the term “contained” for the first time in his 1956 paper “Development of schizophrenic thought,” in which he described psychotic patient’s projection of “expelled particles of ego” (p. 39) into objects which are then experienced as “containing,” perhaps even being taken over by, the projection. A year later, he (Bion, 1957) observed the futility of the analyst’s attempt to put the projection back into the patient through an interpretation. Unlike the analyst’s experience with healthier analysands, the psychotic portion mind feels assaulted and painfully impinged upon by these traditional analytic interventions. This realization that simply interpreting the projection often served to increase the analysand’s sense of persecution collided with Bion’s (1958) stated conviction in “On arrogance” that in analysis the patient and analyst were “required to pursue the truth.” How is one to help a patient in this pursuit if the conventional analytic tools leave the patient feeling bludgeoned? In response this dilemma, Bion turned his focus away from the patient’s difficulties and trained his attention on the task challenging the analyst, which was “to tolerate the stresses associated with the introjections of another person’s projective identification” (p. 88). This shift in perspective from the patient to the analyst represents, in my view, a radical departure from the extantemphasis on the analysand’s disturbed ego as a limiting factor in “analyzability” to considering the vital role of the clinician’s emotional capacities in the treatment of very ill individuals. Bion had learned that the capacity to “tolerate the stresses” of introjecting the analysand’s projective identification depended upon
the ability [of the patient] to put bad feelings in me and leave them there long enough for them to be modified by their sojourn in my psyche.
(p. 92)
This last statement 16 signals Bion’s recognition that allowing the projection to “sojourn in my psyche” could result in some “modification” of the patient’s “bad feelings,” though the process by which that metamorphosis is achieved awaited further explanation and anticipated his soon-to-arrive thoughts about the container and contained .
In reading Bion’s (1962a) brief paper, “The psycho-analytic study of thinking,” one has the impression of watching an engaging movie trailer that whets our appetite for seeing the entire show, which in this case was the publication of Learning from Experience (1962b) in the same year. In the paper on thinking, he takes an important first step forward to further develop the nascent theme in his schizophrenia papers that suggested the part played by the analyst’s thinking in transforming the patient’s projections. He takes an impressive theoretical leap forward in our understanding of alpha function through connecting the process by which projected feelings are modified by their “sojourn” in the analyst’s psyche with an activity “between mother and infant, a relationship in which normal projective identification is possible” (p. 115). This still leaves the reader wondering what precisely occurs during the transformational sojourn inside the mother (or the analyst), and Bion proposes a procedure between a mother and her baby in which maternal receptivity to the infant’s projected emotions plays a central role:
The mother’s capacity for reverie 17 is the receptor organ 18 for the infant’s harvest of self-sensation gained by its conscious.
(1962a, p. 116) [italics in the original]
The infant requires a mother who is receptive to, and can tolerate the stress of, its projective identifications and through her capacity for reverie “prechews” the baby’s unmetabolized emotional experiences into manageable psychic events (alpha elements). Thus, this short paper about the roots of thinking is an important transitional step to significantly enlarge the theory of alpha function by proposing its intimate link with the object relations of very early development.
In Learning from Experience, Bion (1962b) deconstructs alpha function into its various factors 19 and accords a primary role to reverie, which “is a factor of the mother’s alpha function” (p. 36) and also an expression of love for her baby through her “reception of the infant’s projective identifications whether they are felt by the infant to be good or bad” (p. 36). Bion regards this notion as a “ digestive model ” 20 (p. 42) of alpha function in which “the alimentary system [is used] as a model for the processes of thought” (p. 62). Accordingly, through her reverie (a factor of alpha function) the mother converts “uncooked” (Ferro, 2005) emotional experience (β elements) into mentally “digestible” morsels (α elements) that the infant’s undeveloped psyche can absorb without feeling oppressively choked by some foreign body too large to swallow. Maternal reverie also seems to involve, with the ascendancy of the depressive position, a capacity to spontaneously link together disparate α elements into a selected fact that forms a coherent narrative. Over time the infant introjects its mother’s alpha function, and the associated capacity for reverie, which forms the core of its own developing 21 ability to metabolize experience.
It is only in the last few pages of Learning from Experience that Bion introduces the concept of container and contained along with an intersubjective (Brown, 2009a, 2011a) perspective on the relationship between the two, which I have termed a procreative model and Sandler (2000) has called the “reproductive” point of view. Interestingly, Bion decides to represent the container with the sign “♀” and the contained with “♂,” thereby implying a sexual connotation 22 about which he later comments in Attention and Interpretation (1970):
The use of the male and female symbols is deliberate but must not be taken to mean that other than sexual implications are excluded ... [and is] the sexual relationship ♀♂
(pp. 106–107)
Bion additionally underscores the intersubjective aspects of container and contained by using the word commensal to describe the interaction between the mother as container and the baby as contained, which he characterizes as a model from which
the mother derives benefit and achieves mental growth from the experience: the infant likewise extracts benefit and achieves growth.
(p. 110)
Furthermore, he offers an observation that I believe many analysts have overlooked: that the infant incorporates this shared commensal activity of “thinking” together with its mother, represented by ♀♂, as its alpha function. Most writers view alpha function originating in the infant through introjection of the maternal alpha function; however, from the procreative point of view, alpha function also is formed by the internalization of an intersubjective relationship:
The activity that I have here described as shared by two individuals becomes introjected by the infant so that the ♀♂ apparatus becomes installed in the infant as part of the apparatus of alpha-function.
(p. 91) [italics added]
Moreover, Bion stresses the shared experience of mutual emotional growth in both container and contained; development that depends upon a milieu of tolerated doubt between mother and infant and, finally, this “Growing ♂♀ provides the basis of an apparatus for learning by experience” (p. 92).
In summary, Bion’s discovery of alpha function represents a selected fact that brought together several strains of his thinking during an especially fertile period from 1958 to 1960. This period followed on the heels of his writings in the 1950s about schizophrenic thinking and it was also a time in which he developed his theory of dreaming while simultaneously writing the Amiens diary. These themes coalesced within the context of his marriage to Francesca Bion that appears to have provided him with the necessary background of safety to deal with his war trauma, the stresses of working with psychotic patients and provided him with a profound experience of personal containment. I suspect that he gleaned from his own individual experience and from clinical encounters with psychotic states of mind an appreciation of the necessary presence for another containing mind to absorb and modify by some unspecified process the emotional turmoil that the troubled psyche cannot manage on its own. His continued exploration of the means by which this metabolizing operation occurred led Bion to appreciate the vital role of the mother’s capacity to withstand taking in her baby’s projections and subject these to her reverie, which he viewed as a factor of alpha function. Bion first considered this process from a digestive model in which the “infant depends on the Mother to act as its α-function” (Bion, 1963, p. 27) to effectively pre-masticate experience, but later added an intersubjective framework when he (Bion, 1962b) introduced the notion of the container (♀) and the contained (♂). The ♀♂ may be seen as the first couple, 23 mother and infant, who grow together through the ability to tolerate doubt until some meaning is ascribed to unprocessed emotions and this collective activity is introjected as the “apparatus for thinking” (Bion, 1963, p. 31), a central component of alpha function, by which we are able to learn from experience. Thus, alpha function is the overarching concept of which reverie and the container/contained (♀♂) are factors (Brown, 2013) . Bion uses the sign ♀♂ to refer to two phenomena: the container/ contained relationship between mother and infant and also to denote the “apparatus for thinking.” This may seem confusing at first, especially for a writer like Bion who is so precise, but it seems his intention is to convey an intricate connection linking these two factors of alpha function, i.e., between the early mother/baby relationship and the apparatus for thinking.
Though Bion’s work after the publication of Learning from Experience explored many areas of great importance, I want to stay with the focus on how his further researches led to a more complete understanding of the constituent factors of alpha function. In addition to the factors of reverie/ dreaming, container/contained and the apparatus for thinking which comprise alpha function, Bion adds the Ps↔D balance and tolerated doubt as additional components in Elements of Psychoanalysis (1963). Some of these factors duplicate each other’s functions and/or may be represented by the same denotation (e. g., the use of ♀♂ for both “container/contained” and the “apparatus for thinking”), which can be confusing to the reader. Thus, I suggest bringing these together under the catchphrase of a Constellation for Thinking .
Having outlined a general theory of alpha function in Learning from Experience (1962b), Bion began at the end of that book to elaborate in greater detail the factors that comprised it when he launched the study of the container/contained. In the following year, Elements of Psychoanalysis (1963) was published in which he elevated the “dynamic relationship between container and contained” (p. 3) from its appearance in the closing pages of Learning as a near afterthought, to be the foremost element in psychoanalysis, thereby according a primacy to the analytic dyad, its link to the early mother/infant dialogue and the development of the apparatus for thinking. To these phenomena he added a second element, the Ps↔D balance, which refers to the oscillation between moments of coherence (D signifying the depressive position) and of relative disintegration (Ps standing for the paranoid-schizoid position). His unique interpretation of Ps and D represented a creative elaboration of Klein’s original concepts and now, for Bion, the fluctuations between these states indicated an analytic engagement that was alive and evolving. In what may appear to be a blurring of terms, Bion links the concepts of Ps↔D and ♀♂ and views these factors as working collaboratively: the existence of a container (♀) is a necessary presence to gather up the psychic bits of experience (♂) that enables coherence (D) to emerge out of fragmentation (Ps). As a corollary, the ♀♂ depends upon the mind’s capacity to tolerate swings in the Ps↔D balance 24 (tolerated doubt) and Bion states that these are “mechanisms each of which can at need assume the characteristics of the other” (p. 44).
Many of these factors that comprise alpha function overlap and are redundant, which can easily appear confusing to the reader. Nevertheless,
I believe that Bion’s model actually captures the intricate connections and redundancies upon which rests the capacity to transform (think) raw emotional experiences into elements of thought. I suggest that these various factors may be gathered together under the rubric (schematized here) 25 of a Constellation for Thinking, all of which are subsumed by the super-ordinate concept of alpha function, which is the engine that drives transformations:
Moving from left to right, the three columns map the growth of the concept of alpha function. We will recall that in his work with psychotic patients Bion observed that their capacity for reverie had been severely impeded and he concluded that there was psychological meaning to this symptom: that these individuals had dismantled their capacity to know reality. This led Bion to amend Freud’s theory of dreaming by claiming that dreams function to give emotional meaning to reality experiences. Furthermore, he needed a theory about how the capacity to dream (as an act of transforming experience) developed in the individual psyche that brought him to propose the model of the container/contained (♀♂), or how the early mother/infant pair “thought” together, which, when introjected into the baby’s psyche, became the “apparatus for thinking.” Bion (1963) accorded the container/contained relationship the primary place in the psychoanalytic encounter and added, secondarily, the Ps↔D balance and its oscillations between states of relative disintegration with experiences of integration. Finally, and most importantly, emotional growth in both the patient and analyst depended on being able to tolerate the doubt and turbulence (Ps) of not knowing until some selected fact appeared (D) to bring coherence to what had been disjointed and incomprehensible.
This chapter has traced Bion’ s discovery of alpha function and its subsequent elaboration. His traumatic experiences as a young tank commander in World War I (overlaid on, and intertwined with, childhood conflicts) gave him first-hand exposure to very painful emotions that tested his capacity to manage. Later, in the 1950s, after his analysis with Melanie Klein and marriage to Francesca Bion, he undertook the analysis of psychotic patients and learned how they disassembled their ability to know reality as a defense against unbearable emotional truths in their lives. This led Bion to identify an aspect of dreaming that was necessary in order for reality experience to be given personal meaning so that one may learn from experience. Simultaneous with working out this new theory of dreaming, Bion also revisited his World War I experiences that had remained undigested and all these elements coalesced into a selected fact – his discovery of alpha function. In subsequent writings, Bion explored the constituent factors of alpha function, including the container/contained relationship, the Ps↔D balance, reverie, tolerated doubt and other factors I have termed the Constellation for Thinking .
1 Previously published as Brown (2012) Bion’s discovery of alpha function: Thinking under fire on the battlefield and in the consulting room. IJP, 93: 1191–1214.
2 Bion (1997) used this phrase in the War Diaries while comparing the common plight of the frontline soldier, whether British or German, who “live in the same danger, the same vile conditions ... [to the] “war profiteers [who] are sitting at home in Germany or England making the best of a very bad job ” (p. 292) [italics added].
3 Compare with Robert Graves comment that “These daydreams persisted like an alternate life and did not leave me until well in 1928. The scenes were nearly always recollections of my first four months in France; the emotion-recording apparatus seems to have failed after [the battle of] Loos” (Graves, 1929) [italics added].
4 The relationship between trauma and psychosis is a very complex one that goes beyond the scope of this paper. Though Bion rarely, if ever, mentions trauma in his psychoanalytic writings, many of the characteristics of the traumatized and psychotic mind are similar: the blunted capacity for abstract thought and dreaming and the tendency to fragmentation are two examples. Additionally, I propose the existence in severely traumatized patients of a traumatic organization that rigidly holds together a shattered psyche and can feel impermeable to analytic access just like the psychotic part of the mind (Brown, 2005, 2006). Much of what Bion ascribes to the psychotic mind also applies to the severely traumatized individual.
5 Sandler (2003) regards Bion’s (1997a) War Memoirs (of which the Amiens Diary is a part) as an “autobiographical counterpart” (p. 59) to Cogitations, though he does not link these together as a joint project to work through war trauma.
6 Some of these entries were undated, but are thought to have been written in this period.
7 Bion’s analysis with Melanie Klein ended in 1952. One might speculate that his analysis “readied” him for the intimacy with Francesca. It is interesting that most writers attribute Bion’s capacity to work through his war trauma to Francesca’s empathic gifts, yet there is little mention of the analysis with Klein as a factor in this process.
8 The Distinguished Service Order medal awarded to Bion for meritorious service during combat in World War I.
9 It is interesting to note that Bion and Francesca did not take their honeymoon until seven years after their marriage (Bleandonu, 1994) and it appears that a visit to the site of the Battle of Amiens was part of their itinerary.
10 Similarly, Roper (2009) quotes Hankey (1917), “The weird thing was that I couldn’t wake up properly” (p. 91).
11 It was common at the time to distinguish between the peace neuroses, that is, ordinary neuroses, and the war neuroses (also known at the time as shell shock ).
12 The Italian analyst, Francesco Corrao (1981), proposed the existence of a gamma function in groups, analogous to alpha function in the individual, which task is to transform the shared traumatic emotions that have permeated the group. Thus, Carrao’s formulation goes a long way in explaining the therapeutic effectiveness of the group’s power to help the members bear and “digest” (transform) experience as well as the affective cement that bonds the group together.
13 The container/container relationship is a factor of alpha function.
14 Bion wrote several accounts of this battle and I am using the 1958 version because it “is altered in such a way as to sharpen the aspect of failed containing” (Roper, in press).
15 The subject of alpha function covers a wide range of phenomena including the differentiation of the conscious and unconscious, the nature of psychotic thinking, the relationship between dreaming and hallucination, to name a few. My focus here, however, is to investigate the development of Bion’s theory of alpha function and his subsequent formulation of the container and contained as well as the interconnection between these concepts.
16 Bion (1959) also reports this assertion in “Attacks on linking,” but does not explore this idea further.
17 Bion (1957) had earlier referred to stunted capacity for reverie, i.e., an absence of freely imaginative thinking, in the psychotic part of the personality.
18 The use of this phrase, “receptor organ,” seems to be a direct reference to Freud’s (1912) statement that the analyst “must turn his own unconscious like a receptive organ towards the transmitting unconscious of the patient” (p. 115) [italics added]. Thus, I believe that Bion appears to be associating the capacity to tolerate the stress of accepting the patient’s projections and the analyst’s openness to reverie with Freud’s description of unconscious communication (see also Brown, 2011a, Chapter 4).
19 Bion (1962b) defines a factor as “the name for a mental activity operating in consort with other mental activities to constitute a function” (p. 2).
20 Bion also offers what I (Brown, 2009, 2011a) call a “procreative model” of alpha function.
21 Grotstein (2007) asserts that there is an inchoate alpha function at birth; thus, the introjection of maternal alpha function enables and strengthens this inborn capacity.
22 In the Commentary section of Second Thoughts Bion (1967a) alludes to ♀♂ as a “sexual model” (p. 140), but does not elaborate this further.
23 I would suggest that the container/contained couple represents an earlier stage of “couple-hood” that is foundational for the Kleinian (1945) early Oedipal situation which itself scaffolds the classical Freudian Oedipus Complex.
24 Though Bion does not connect his earlier (1962b) concept of “tolerated doubt” with the Ps↔D balance (1963), it seems to me that these are nearly interchangeable ideas and that the latter replaced the earlier notion.
25 This schema is an expanded version of what I (Brown, 2011) have previously proposed.