ABSTRACT
This chapter utilizes two of W. R. Bion's functional models of the mental apparatus—the "digestive" model and the "reproductive" one—in order to move towards an integrated model of thought processes. Thinking is intrinsically intertwined with knowledge. Sigmund Freud's and Bion's psychoanalytic developments of D. Hume's, I. Kant's, and F. Nietzsche's epistemology allows to discriminate between pretensions of getting knowledge and coping with processes of knotting. The processes of thinking and perhaps even the development of an ability to think are imposed on the mind. Psychoanalytical research has illuminated how pretensions to knowledge and abhorrence towards coping with transient processes of knowing appertain to the realm of hallucination. In contrast, coping with processes—necessarily incomplete—of knowing appertains to the realm of human nature and its relationships with the real world and real, Nature-dependent facts. Processes of knowing, especially dream-work, are dependent on an epistemological function of the mind. Bion proposed an analogical model of thinking processes—namely, the functioning of the digestive apparatus.
