ABSTRACT
The wisdom of lived experience gathers strands from various sources—neuroscience, philosophy, psychoanalysis, history, literature—each enriching our understanding about what transforms the inanimate into the animate, what occurs in awakenings, in coming alive. Neuroscience emphasises how primary affect is for all of neural functioning, but also how vital is its mediation by cortical processes in order to enable consciousness of those affects and their intensities and valences. Coming alive to our lived experience, in W. R. Bion's thinking, requires such a mutually dependent process. Alpha function, then, is at the heart of the process Bion describes as container–contained. This process embraces both the receiving function of the reverie and the at times overwhelming tensions or affects derived from lived experience. It involves both conscious and unconscious processing and remains one of dialectical tension, container and contained being mutually dependent upon one another.
