Editing Wilfred Bion (section)

==Bion on thinking==
"During the 1950s and 1960s, Bion transformed Melanie Klein's theories of infantile phantasy...into an epistemological "theory of thinking" of his own."<ref>Jacobus, p. 174</ref> Bion used as his starting point the phenomenology of the analytic hour, highlighting the two principles of "the emergence of truth and mental growth. The mind grows through exposure to truth."<ref>Symington & Symington, 1996, pp. 2–3</ref> The foundation for both mental development and truth are, for Bion, emotional experience.<ref>Bion, 1962, Intro & pp. 5–6.</ref>

The evolution of emotional experience into the capacity for thought, and the potential derailment of this process, are the primary phenomena described in Bion's model. Through his hypothesized alpha and beta elements, Bion provides a language to help one think about what is occurring during the analytic hour. These tools are intended for use outside the hour in the clinician's reflective process. To attempt to apply his models during the analytic session violates the basic principle whereby "Bion had advocated starting every session 'without memory, desire or understanding'—his antidote to those intrusive influences that otherwise threaten to distort the analytic process."<ref>Patrick Casement, ''Further Learning from the Patient'' (London 1990) p. 10</ref>

===Alpha elements, beta elements, and alpha function===
Bion created a theory of thinking based on changing beta elements (unmetabolized psyche/soma/affective experience) into alpha elements (thoughts that can be thought by the thinker). Beta elements were seen as cognate to the underpinnings of the "basic assumptions" identified in his work with groups: "the fundamental anxieties that underlie the basic assumption group resistances were originally thought of as ''proto-mental phenomena''...forerunners of Bion's later concept of beta-elements."<ref>Grotstein, in Richard Morgan-Jones, ''The Body of the Organisation and its Health'' (London 2010) p. 26</ref> They were equally conceptual developments from his work on [[projective identification]]—from the "minutely split 'particles'" Bion saw as expelled in pathological projective identification by the psychotic, who would then go on to "lodge them in the angry, so-called [[bizarre object]]s by which he feels persecuted and controlled".<ref>Jacobus, pp. 206–7</ref> For "these raw bits of experience he called beta-elements...to be actively handled and made use of by the mind they must, through what Bion calls alpha-functions, become alpha-elements".<ref>Michael Parsons, ''The Dove that Returns, the Dove that Vanishes'' (London 2000) p. 198</ref>

β elements, α elements and α function are elements that Bion (1963) hypothesizes. He does not consider β-elements, α- elements, nor α function to actually exist. The terms are instead tools for thinking about what is being observed. They are elements whose qualities remain unsaturated, meaning we cannot know the full extent or scope of their meaning, so they are intended as tools for thought rather than real things to be accepted at face value (1962, p.&nbsp;3).

Bion took for granted that the infant requires a mind to help it tolerate and organize experience. For Bion, thoughts exist prior to the development of an apparatus for thinking. The apparatus for thinking, the capacity to have thoughts "has to be called into existence to cope with thoughts" (1967, p.&nbsp;111). Thoughts exist prior to their realization. Thinking, the capacity to think the thoughts which already exist, develops through another mind providing α-function (1962, p.&nbsp;83)—through the "[[container]]" role of maternal reverie.

To learn from experience alpha-function must operate on the awareness of the emotional experience; alpha–elements are produced from the impressions of the experience; these are thus made storable and available for dream thoughts and for unconscious waking thinking... If there are only beta-elements, which cannot be made unconscious, there can be no repression, suppression, or learning. (Bion, 1962, p.&nbsp;8)

α-function works upon undigested facts, impressions, and sensations, that cannot be mentalized—beta-elements. α-function digests β-elements, making them available for thought (1962, pp.&nbsp;6–7).
<blockquote>
Beta-elements are not amenable to use in dream thoughts but are suited for use in [[projective identification]]. They are influential in producing acting out. These are objects that can be evacuated or used for a kind of thinking that depends on manipulation of what are felt to be things in themselves as if to substitute such manipulations for words or ideas... Alpha-function transforms sense impressions into alpha-elements which resemble, and may in fact be identical with, the visual images with which we are familiar in dreams, namely, the elements that Freud regards as yielding their latent content when the analyst has interpreted them. Failure of alpha-function means the patient cannot dream and therefore cannot sleep. As alpha-function makes the sense impressions of the emotional experience available for conscious and dream—thought the patient who cannot dream cannot go to sleep and cannot wake up. (1962, pp. 6–7)
</blockquote>

===Bizarre object<!--'Bizarre object' and 'Bizarre objects' redirect here-->===
'''Bizarre objects'''<!--boldface per WP:R#PLA-->, according to Bion, are impressions of external objects which, by way of [[projective identification]], form a "screen" that's imbued with characteristics of the subject's own personality; they form part of his interpretation of [[object relations theory]].<ref>{{cite journal
| last1      = WHITE
| first1     = ROBERT S.
| date       = 2011
| title      = Bion and Mysticism: The Western Tradition
| url        = https://www.jstor.org/stable/26305190
| journal    = American Imago
| volume     = 68
| issue      = 2
| pages      =  213–240
| doi        = 10.1353/aim.2011.0027
| jstor = 26305190
| s2cid = 170557065
| access-date = 2022-08-23
| quote      = What Freud calls impression of objects, Bion calls [Beta]-elements. [...] If the [Beta]-elements cannot be transformed into thoughts, they are then expelled from the mind and end up as bizarre objects. These bizarre objects cluster around the patient and form a [Beta]-screen, an impenetrable barrier (Bion 1962; Grotstein 1980).}}</ref> Bion saw psychotic attacks on the normal linking between objects as producing a fractured world, where the patient felt themselves surrounded by hostile bizarre objects—the by-products of the broken linkages.<ref>[http://www.psychoanalysis-and-therapy.com/human_nature/glover/chap4.html The legacy of Wifrid Bion]</ref> Such objects, with their [[Id, ego and super-ego|superego]] components,<ref>J. Abram, ''The Language of Winnicott'' (2007) pp. 88–9</ref> blur the boundary of internal and external, and impose a kind of externalised [[moralism]] on their victims.<ref>Robert Caper, ''A Mind of One's Own'' (2005) p. 7 and p. 139</ref> They can also contain ego-functions that have been evacuated from the self as part of the defence against thinking, sensing, and coming to terms with reality: thus a man may feel watched by his telephone,<ref>N. Symington, ''Narcissism'' (1993) p. 110</ref> or that the music player being listened to is in fact listening to him in turn.<ref>R. Anderson ed., ''Clinical Lectures on Klein and Bion'' (1992) p. 93</ref>

====Later developments====
[[Hanna Segal]] considered bizarre objects more difficult to re-internalise than either good or bad objects due to their splintered state: grouped together in a mass or psychic gang, their threatening properties may contribute to [[agoraphobia]].<ref>H. Segal, ''Dream, Phantasy and Art'' (2006) p. 38</ref>

===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).

===Reversible perspective and −K===
"Reversible Perspective" was a term coined by Bion to illuminate "a peculiar and deadly form of analytic ''impasse'' which defends against psychic pain".<ref>Mary Jacobus, ''The Poetics of Psychoanalysis'' (London 2005) p. 43</ref> It represents the clash of "two independently experienced views or phenomena whose meanings are incompatible".<ref>Jacobus, p. 261</ref> In Bion's own words, "Reversible perspective is evidence of pain; the patient reverses perspective so as to make a dynamic situation static."<ref name="Jacobus, p. 243">Jacobus, p. 243</ref>

As summarised by [[Horacio Etchegoyen|Etchegoyen]], "Reversible perspective is an extreme case of rigidity of thought. ... As Bion says, what is most characteristic in such cases is the manifest accord and the latent discord."<ref>F. Horacio Etchegoyen, ''The Fundamentals of Psychoanalytic Technique'' (London 2005) pp. 770–2</ref> In clinical contexts, what may happen is that the analyst's "interpretation is accepted, but the ''premises have been rejected'' ... the actual specificity, the substance of the interpretation".<ref>Ruth R. Malcolm, "As if", in Robin Anderson ed., ''Clinical Lectures on Klein and Bion'' (London 1982) p. 116 and p. 118</ref> Reversible perspective is an aspect of "the potential destruction and deformation of knowledge"<ref name="Jacobus, p. 243"/> – one of the attacks on linking of −K.

===O: The ineffable===
As his thought continued to develop, Bion came to use ''[[Negative capability|Negative Capability]]'' and the suspension of Memory and Desire in his work as an analyst, in order to investigate psychic reality - which he regarded as essentially 'non-sensuous' (1970). Following his 1965 book Transformations he had an increasing interest in what he termed the domain of "O" – the unknowable, or ultimate Truth. "In aesthetics, Bion has been described as a [[Immanuel Kant|neo-Kantian]] for whom reality, or the thing-in-itself (O), cannot be known, only be "be-ed" (1965). What can be known is said by Bion to be in the realm of K, impinging through its sensory channels.<ref>Jacobus, p. 227</ref> If the observer can desist from "irritably reaching for fact and reason", and suspend the normal operation of the faculties of memory and apperception, what Bion called transformations in knowledge can permit an 'evolution' where transformations in K touch on transformations in Being (O). Bion believed such moments to feel both ominous and turbulent, threatening a loss of anchorage in everyday 'narrative' security.

Bion would speak of "an intense catastrophic emotional explosion O,"<ref>Quoted in Jacobus, p. 251n</ref> which could only be known through its aftereffects. Where before he had privileged the domain of knowledge (K), now he would speak as well of "resistance to the shift from transformations involving K (knowledge) to transformations involving O ... resistance to the unknowable".<ref>Jacobus, pp. 251–2</ref> Hence his injunctions to the analyst to eschew memory and desire, to "bring to bear a diminution of the 'light' – a penetrating beam of darkness; a reciprocal of the searchlight. If any object existed, however faint, it would show up very clearly".<ref>Bion quoted in Patrick Casement, ''On Learning from the Patient'' (London 1990) p. 223</ref> In stating this he was making connections to Freud, who in a letter to Lou Andreas Salome had referred to a mental counterpart of scotopic, "mole like vision", used to gain impressions of the Unconscious. He was also making links with the ''apophatic'' method used by contemplative thinkers such as St John of the Cross, a writer quoted many times by Bion. Bion was well aware that our perception and our attention often blind us to what genuinely and strikingly is new in every moment.