ABSTRACT
Wilfred Bion was concerned with giving a scientific status to psychoanalysis. Psychoanalytical formulations in both theory and clinical practice need to preserve an unsaturated quality, analogous to an unresolved mathematical variable that can, in turn, be "saturated" by experience. It is what Bion begins to call preconception in "A theory of thinking" in Second Thoughts. Then, in Elements of Psycho-analysis, he also gives the name of preconception to one of the uses of thoughts, also as an unknown variable in the service of attention and enquiry functions. In Cogitations, which included his most private reflections, Bion called the alpha function dreamwork alpha. Bion considered that the emotional experience studied by psychoanalysis can be a digested or an undigested one. Container and contained must be kept within a constant relationship through emotions as a link, which, in turn, must be capable of transformation.
