ABSTRACT
There are two ways in which any element can exist within the personality. It can be present either uncreated or created. The task of psychoanalysis is to create the uncreated, to create what is already there. Dreaming as a creative power rather than an instinctual wish fulfilment, as Freud saw it, was central in the thinking of Wilfred Bion who used the term alpha function to describe this. Consciousness is a product of this inner creative activity. Consciousness may be either not present or very restricted. This may be because the creative function is undeveloped or because to create it burdens the personality with the pain of loneliness. Isaiah Berlin, basing himself on the insights of Giambattista Vico, believed that the way in which we know the inanimate world is different from the way in which we know our fellow human beings: that there is a different form of knowledge.
