ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the premise that psychotic anxieties are universal. One possible brief description of the fundamental characteristics of psychotic functioning might be: pathological splitting and pathological projective identification. Yet, in so far as there is no "pure" psychotic functioning, in other words Bion's "psychotic personality" is an abstraction, an activity of the non-psychotic part must coexist at the same time. In relation to the existence of a non-psychotic part in psychosis, this is an idea we already find in Freud when he says that in all madness there is a fragment of truth, and that "the delusion owes its convincing power to the element of historical truth which it inserts in the place of the rejected reality". According to Bion the sense impressions of emotional experience received by the individual from everything outside his mind need to be transformed into something "digestible", or, rather, into something that is later able to be used for thinking.
