ABSTRACT
The inability of the psychotic to ‘digest’ his experience mentally because of his lack of capacity for α contributes to the situation with which most observers are familiar, namely the easy accessibility to the observer of what should be the psychotic’s unconscious. These elements remain detectable because the patient cannot make them unconscious. They are therefore also, as I have shown, not available to him because there has been no dream-work-α done to make them unconscious and therefore available to him. He is a man both unable to make these elements unconscious and unable to profit by experience, for profiting by experience means being able to make the material consciously perceived into material that can be mentally stored in such a way that it is susceptible of both concretization and abstraction.
