ABSTRACT
This chapter is devoted to describing the nature of an emotional experience, which, in Bion’s terms, is “an experience that does not depend on the senses”. The importance of external reality is such that the psyche must go beyond sensory experience in favour of the qualities of pleasure/unpleasure that it arouses, and transform these elements into material that can be used by the psyche. Bion calls “alpha function” the process of transformation that, with the help of normal projective identification, produces “alpha elements” that can be used in dreams, unconscious thought, and conscious thought. According to Bion, the personality being ruled by functions and factors, psychoanalytic observation led him to think that many patients are not equipped with a sufficiently developed alpha function owing to a disturbed emotional development which led, either to a “reversal of alpha function” or to a “destruction of alpha function” and, consequently, to a hypertrophied use of projective identification that we have to deal with in clinical situations.
