Learning from Experience

Learning from Experience sets out Bion's account of how a mind becomes able to think. Published in 1962, it proposes an alpha function that works on raw sense impressions and emotion, the unprocessed beta elements, converting them into alpha elements that can be stored, dreamed, and used for thought. Where that function fails, experience cannot be digested and accumulates as material only for evacuation. Bion locates the origin of thinking in relationship: the infant projects unbearable states into a mother whose reverie receives and detoxifies them, the container holding the contained until it can be returned in tolerable form. From this he argues that thinking is not given but has to be developed, growing precisely because the mind must find some way to cope with thoughts and with the frustration they carry. For the clinician the book supplies a working vocabulary for what happens, or stalls, in the consulting room.