Alpha-transformation, mental void, and edition

Abstract

There are patients whose outstanding feature is a particular difficulty in “communicating with themselves.” According to Bion, who reconceptualized Freud's theory, all of us have in our inner world the potential for both producing and blocking alpha-transformations. When they are blocked, beta-elements are formed, which are unable to generate thought. Our capacity to think and to think “ourselves” depends exclusively on alpha-elements. Patients suffering from problems derived from a compensated “structural mental void” are unable to think. Following Bion, the “non-edited” would, generally speaking, be one of the facts that condition the formation of beta-elements. The production of beta-elements transforms these personalities into “functional illiterates.” To what extent can we ignore the “novelties” that these patients present us with through the production of beta-elements and “bizarre objects”? I wonder whether the concepts of “repetition” and “re-edition,” as they are currently used in the clinical process, are not actually casting a shadow over our minds, thus thwarting our ability to assess the total dimension of this “functional illiterate” condition. The analyst's mind can be the first link in a patient's chain of unthinkable thoughts: (1) repetition; (2) embryonic thoughts; (3) the non-edited; (4) structural mental void; (5) functional illiterate; and (6) mental abortions.

Keywords:

• W.R. Bion
• alpha-transformation
• mental void
• edition

Notes

¹What follows is Bion's statement from his Italian seminars on July 8, 1977: “But I would like to be able to say, ‘Please tell me when your optic pits, at about the third somite, became functional. Tell me when your auditory pits became functional” (Bion, 2005, pp. 2–3).

²Gestalt theory claims both that the whole is more than the sum of its parts, and that the whole is different from the sum of its parts. There is a huge conceptual difference between “more” and “different.”

³ Ashley Montagu's book Touching: The human significance of the skin (Chapters 2 and 3) was very helpful to me in reference to perinatal symbiosis and the continuity between intrauterine and extrauterine lives. He mentions there the “neotenia phenomenon” and says, quoting Bostock: “Human gestation actually comprises an intrauterine phase or uterine gestation, and an extrauterine phase or extero-gestation … [which] finishes when the child starts crawling … and would last as long as uterine gestation” (that is, nine months each).

⁴This is a term originated in the field of information technology and formulated by Negroponte in his 1996 book Being digital. Negroponte's approach helped me to rethink the concept of cesura (Bion, 1977; Freud, 1925–26). It also led me to include in my conceptualizations Liberman's contributions to communications theory (Liberman, 1976).