Editing Wilfred Bion (section)

===Knowledge, love and hate===
Successful application of alpha-function leads to "the capacity to tolerate the actual frustration involved in learning ("K") that [Bion] calls 'learning from experience{{' "}}.<ref>Jacobus, p. 193</ref> The opposite of knowledge "K" was what Bion termed "−K": "the process that strips, denudes, and devalues persons, experiences, and ideas."<ref>Jacobus, p. 192</ref>

Both K and −K interact for Bion with Love and Hate, as links within the analytic relationship. "The complexities of the emotional link, whether Love or Hate or Knowledge [L, H, and K – the Bionic relational triad]"<ref>Jacobus, p. 233</ref> produce ever-changing "atmospheric" effects in the analytic situation. The patient's focus may wish to be "on Love and Hate (L and H) rather than the knowledge (K) that is properly at stake in psychoanalytic inquiry."<ref>Jacobus, p. 240</ref>

For Bion, "knowledge is not a thing we have, but a link between ourselves and what we know ... K is being willing to know but not insisting on knowledge."<ref>Parsons, p. 67 and p. 48</ref> By contrast, -K is "not just ignorance but the active avoidance of knowledge, or even the wish to destroy the capacity for it"<ref>Parsons, p. 48</ref> – and "enacts what 'Attacks on Linking' identifies as hatred of emotion, hatred of reality, hatred of life itself."<ref>Jacobus, p. 222</ref>

Looking for the source of such hate (H), Bion notes in ''Learning from Experience'' that, "Inevitably one wonders at various points in the investigation why such a phenomenon as that represented by −K should exist. ... I shall consider one factor only – Envy. By this term I mean the phenomenon described by Melanie Klein in ''Envy and Gratitude''" (1962, p.&nbsp;96).