Beta Element

the contact-barrier and the dream thoughts and un-conscious waking thinking which are the texture of the contact-barrier are turned into alpha-elements, divested of all characteristics that separate them from beta-elements and are then projected thus forming the beta-screen.

Bion demonstrates that the reversal of alpha-function strips alpha-elements of their differentiating properties, reducing them to beta-elements and thereby generating the beta-screen through projective evacuation.

Bion, Wilfred Ruprecht, Learning from Experience, 1962thesis

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the painful emotional experience is associated with the coming together of a pre-conception and a beta-element… the baby can: (1) eject the beta-element and lay the foundation for incapacity to think (2) accept the beta-element with juxtaposition with the pre-conception, tolerate the intrinsic frustration, and thus be in process of alpha-function.

Bion specifies the two developmental forks at the junction of pre-conception and beta element: ejection forecloses thought, while tolerant acceptance inaugurates alpha-function and the capacity for thinking.

Bion, Wilfred Ruprecht, Learning from Experience, 1962thesis

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predominance of beta-elements which are remarkable for their concreteness to a point where some patients regard words not as the names of things but as things-in-themselves.

Bion identifies the clinical hallmark of beta-element dominance as radical concreteness, in which words lose symbolic function and are experienced as material objects.

Bion, Wilfred Ruprecht, Learning from Experience, 1962thesis

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He lacks the apparatus, alpha-function, by which he might understand his predicament. The patient greedily and fearfully takes one beta-element after another apparently unable to conceive of any activity other than introjection of more beta-elements.

Bion portrays the psychotic patient as trapped in compulsive introjection of beta elements, lacking the alpha-function necessary to transform raw experience into meaningful thought.

Bion, Wilfred Ruprecht, Learning from Experience, 1962thesis

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what I have called a beta-element (to employ an abstraction) represents an infant’s feeling that the breast in actuality is an evacuated object and therefore indistinguishable.

Bion grounds the beta element in Kleinian infant experience, equating it with the evacuated bad-breast, the primal unit of projective discharge before symbolic differentiation.

Bion, Wilfred Ruprecht, Learning from Experience, 1962thesis

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through projective identification thought itself takes on the function previously entrusted to motor discharge — namely ridding the psyche of accretions of stimuli.

Bion contextualizes the evacuation of beta elements within Freud’s two-principles framework, showing how projective identification substitutes for motor discharge in unburdening the psyche.

Bion, Wilfred Ruprecht, Learning from Experience, 1962supporting

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Undreamable dreams are understood as manifestations of psychotic and psychically foreclosed aspects of the personality; interrupted dreams are viewed as reflections of neurotic and other non-psychotic parts of the personality.

Ogden extends the Bionian problematic of beta-element experience into the clinical register of undreamable and interrupted dreams, mapping foreclosed experience onto psychotic aspects of the personality.

Ogden, Thomas, This Art of Psychoanalysis: Dreaming Undreamt Dreams and Interrupted Cries, 2004supporting

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the account of the patient who feels that words are things-in-themselves

Bion briefly invokes beta-element concreteness as a clinical reference point in the context of a discussion of model-making and abstraction.

Bion, Wilfred Ruprecht, Learning from Experience, 1962aside

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