British Journal of Psychotherapy 32, 2 (2016) 215–225 doi: 10.1111/bjp.

12213

B I O N , A L PH A - F U N C T I O N A N D T H E
UNCONSCIOUS MIND

NICOLA ABEL-HIRSCH
This paper will identify why and how Bion’s ideas about dream-work and
alpha-function evolved, and the profound implications of this
development for what he calls ‘practical psychoanalysis’. Andre Green
interestingly comments that for Bion the ‘model of the dream’ was
unusually more important than the ‘model of the baby’; and I will
consider in particular the question of ‘models’, and their relation to the
making of the accurate observations of unconscious functioning we need
to underpin our analytic work. It is hoped the paper will contribute to the
clinically relevant question of whether there is an important link between
Bion’s ‘alpha-function’ and mentalization theory.

KEY WORDS: ALPHA-FUNCTION, UNCONSCIOUS, BETA, THINKING,

DREAMING, FRUSTRATION, OMNISCIENCE

Bion gives the name ‘alpha-function’ to the ‘change from something which is not
thought at all to something which is thought’ as in the following:
The poet Donne has written ‘the blood spoke in her cheek . . . as if her body
thought’. This expresses exactly that intervening stage which in the Grid is
portrayed on paper as a line separating beta elements from alpha elements
. . . a situation of change from something which is not thought at all to
something which is thought. (Brazilian Lectures, Vol. 7, 1973, p. 44,
emphasis added, in Bion, 2014)
In this paper I will consider various aspects of Bion’s work on how thought becomes
possible and some of the difficulties involved in this process. His work in this area
has importantly contributed to current attention on the analyst’s availability to what
the patient has not been able to think themselves.

DIFFICULTIES THINKING AT ALL

Whilst Freud’s patients suffered from excessive repression, Bion’s psychotic patients
had difficulties ‘thinking’ at all. In his paper ‘On arrogance’ (1958), given to the Paris
IPA Congress, Bion notices that a patient is making a complaint and when he follows
the complaint he comes to the view that the patient is complaining that he, Bion,
through his thinking and verbal communication, is in fact experienced as refusing

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216 Nicola Abel-Hirsch
ingress to the patient’s projections. Bion makes what is a mutative shift in perspec-
tive, from focusing on the level of disturbance in the patient, to focusing on the ana-
lyst’s capacity to take in the patient’s projections and it lays the seed for his
developing understanding of what he goes on to call alpha-function:
[I]n so far as I, as analyst, was insisting on verbal communication as a
method of making the patient’s problems explicit, I was felt to be directly
attacking the patient’s methods of communication. From this it became clear
that when I was identified with the obstructive force, what I could not stand
was the patient’s methods of communication. In this phase my employment
of verbal communication was felt by the patient to be a mutilating attack on
his methods of communication. From this point onwards, it was only a
matter of time to demonstrate that the patient’s link with me was his ability
to employ the mechanism of projective identification. That is to say, his
relationship with me and his ability to profit by the association lay in the
opportunity to split off parts of his psyche and project them into me.
On this depended a variety of procedures which were felt to ensure
emotionally rewarding experiences such as, to mention two, the ability to put
bad feelings in me and leave them there long enough for them to be modified
by their sojourn in my psyche, and the ability to put good parts of himself into
me, thereby feeling that he was dealing with an ideal object as a result.
Associated with these experiences was a sense of being in contact with me,
which I am inclined to believe is a primitive form of communication that
provides a foundation on which, ultimately, verbal communication depends.
(1958, p. 146)
Bion’s recognition that allowing the patient’s projection to ‘sojourn in my psyche’
could result in some modification of the patient’s ‘bad feelings’ anticipated in his
soon-to-arrive thoughts about the container, the contained and the relation between
the two.
In his paper ‘Attacks on linking’ the following year, we find a further development
of his nascent thoughts about alpha-function in his now well known model of a
mother and infant, derived from his experience with the patient:
The analytic situation built up in my mind a sense of witnessing an
extremely early scene. I felt that the patient had experienced in infancy a
mother who dutifully responded to the infant’s emotional displays. The
dutiful response had in it an element of impatient ‘I don’t know what the
matter is with the child.’ My deduction was that in order to understand what
the child wanted, the mother should have treated the infant’s cry as more
than a demand for her presence. From the infant’s point of view she should
have taken into her, and thus experienced, the fear that the child was dying.
It was this fear that the child could not contain. He strove to split it off
together with the part of the personality in which it lay and project it into the
mother. An understanding mother is able to experience the feeling of dread,

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 Bion, Alpha-Function and the Unconscious Mind 217
that this baby was striving to deal with by projective identification, and yet
retain a balanced outlook. (1959, pp. 312–13)

DIFFICULTIES THINKING AT ALL: BION’S OWN THINKING

It seems likely that Bion went through a self-analysis, possibly not dissimilar in
importance to him, to Freud’s self-analysis – in the working out of his theory of think-
ing. The American psychoanalyst Larry Brown, in a recent paper, has drawn attention
to the fact that at the same time as Bion’s work on alpha-function he was himself
beginning to write about the traumatic experiences he’d had in the first world war as a
19 year old: ‘Bion felt sick. He wanted to think . . . He wanted to think . . . He tried to
think’ (Bion, 1997, p. 254). Brown comments: ‘This “bombardment” by sensory frag-
ments reduced Bion to vomiting in order to evacuate the sensory overload and must
also have taught him, in retrospect, how the desperate mind madly discharges experi-
ence that cannot be abstracted’ (Brown, 2012, p. 1200). Brown suggests that Bion’s
marriage to Francesca Bion as well as his clinical work with psychotic patients in the
1950s contributed significantly to his understanding of the kind of relationship with
another person that is required to be able to ‘think under fire’.

‘DREAMING’
In the late 1950s, and as a part of his evolving concept of alpha-function, Bion looked
more closely at dreaming. In his personal notes (Cogitations, 1992) we see his gradual
departure from Freud’s theory of dreaming (dreams as the protector of sleep, wish ful-
filment) to Bion’s ideas about the function of dreams in the ‘digestion’ and ‘suffering’
(making personal) of emotional experiences. In early 1960 he draws a distinction
between Freud’s dream-work and what he calls dream-work-a (the capacity to dream
rests on the ability of dream-work-a to transform into a-elements that may be linked in
a dream narrative) This was then replaced by simply ‘alpha-function’. He tends also
to use alpha-function and ‘dreaming’ somewhat interchangeably (from Brown, 2012).
Bion describes the function of the dream as a mental digestive process. More sur-
prisingly, he proposes ‘dreaming’ is going on when we are awake as well as when we
are asleep: ‘Freud says Aristotle states that a dream is the way the mind works in
sleep: I say it is the way it works when awake’ (1992, p. 43). The idea of our ‘dream-
ing’ whilst awake has been picked up in the analytic world and we now hear for
example of the analyst ‘dreaming the patient’s dream’. Why, however, might Bion
not have talked in terms of ‘waking alpha-function’ and ‘sleeping alpha-function’,
rather than stating that dreaming goes on all the time?

ALPHA-FUNCTION AND THE DIFFERENTIATION OF CONSCIOUS AND

UNCONSCIOUS
With his concept of alpha-function, Bion introduces a new understanding of how the
unconscious comes into being. In his view the process – named alpha-function – is
constantly bringing about the differentiation of the conscious and unconscious

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218 Nicola Abel-Hirsch
aspects of the mind. In Chapter 7 of Learning from Experience, Bion gives the fol-
lowing key example – the reader may be reminded that Freud’s main chapter on
dreaming was also a Chapter 7!:
A man talking to a friend converts the sense impressions of this emotional
experience into alpha-elements, thus becoming capable of dream thoughts
and therefore of undisturbed consciousness of the facts whether the facts are
the events in which he participates or his feelings about those events or both.
He is able to remain ‘asleep’ or unconscious of certain elements that cannot
penetrate the barrier presented by his ‘dream’. Thanks to the ‘dream’ he can
continue uninterruptedly to be awake, that is, awake to the fact that he is
talking to his friend, but asleep to elements which, if they could penetrate
the barrier of his ‘dreams’, would lead to domination of his mind by what
are ordinarily unconscious ideas and emotions.
The dream makes a barrier against mental phenomena which might over-
whelm the patient’s awareness that he is talking to a friend, and, at the same
time, makes it impossible for awareness that he is talking to a friend to over-
whelm his phantasies . . .
To sum up: the ‘dream’, together with the alphafunction,1 which makes
dream possible, is central to the operation of consciousness and unconscious-
ness, on which ordered thought depends. (Bion, 1962a, pp. 15–16)
Bion is suggesting ‘dreaming’ whilst awake allows us to be ‘asleep’ to unconscious
elements that would disrupt our conscious mind. This kind of possible echoing of
Freud’s thought (dreams protect sleep) is not uncommon in Bion’s work. I wonder
too whether Bion may be implicitly drawing our attention to the similarity between
our capacity to notice selective facts when awake and the extraordinary capacity of
dreams to do likewise – our capacity to select and condense information in a personal-
ized way that happens both in night dreams and in our capacity to grasp the ‘selected
fact’ in waking. Bion goes on:
In this theory the ability to ‘dream’ preserves the personality from what is
virtually a psychotic state. It therefore helps to explain the tenacity with
which the dream, as represented in classical theory, defends itself against the
attempt to make the unconscious conscious. Such an attempt must appear
indistinguishable from destruction of the capacity to dream in so far as that
capacity is related to differentiating conscious from unconscious and
maintaining the difference so established. (1962a, p. 16)
The interpretation of night dreams as a method by which the unconscious is made
conscious is an employment in reverse, of what is in nature the machinery that is
employed in the transformation of the conscious into material suitable for storage in
the unconscious.
Bion also raises the possibility that night dreams may be a consequence of ‘awake
dreaming’ not having fully processed the emotional experiences present: ‘I wonder if

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 Bion, Alpha-Function and the Unconscious Mind 219
dreams, i.e. the actual emotional experiences, are not the emotional experiences I do
not have, or cannot allow myself to have, during wakefulness’ (1992, p. 149).

THE MODEL OF THE DREAM AND THE MODEL OF THE BABY

Andre Green remarks that for Bion ‘the model of the dream is more important than
the model of the baby’ (1992, p. 587). Bion’s work has been of seminal importance in
drawing attention to the importance of the model of the baby and mother’s reverie in
the development of the mind. I referred at the beginning of the paper to his recogni-
tion of the patient’s need to project ‘unthought’ experiences into the mind of the ana-
lyst and his reference to the importance of maternal reverie for the regulation and
development of an infant’s mind. What does Andre Green then mean? One factor is I
think the question of whether we have overextended our use of the object relations
model to the point that we believe an object to be necessary for all psychic activity –
losing completely Freud’s attention to principles of self-regulation, including the
place of dreams in this. We might overlook the fact that Bion is also of the view that
the individual’s constitution plays a significant part in their development – including
their inborn capacity to bear frustration and through this be able to ‘dream’ their own
experience.

ON THE BEARING OF FRUSTRATION: MODIFICATION OR EVASION

An infant endowed with marked capacity for toleration of frustration might
survive the ordeal of a mother incapable of reverie and therefore incapable
of supplying its mental needs. At the other extreme an infant markedly
incapable of tolerating frustration cannot survive without breakdown even the
experience of projective identification with a mother capable of reverie;
nothing less than unceasing breast feeding would serve and that is not
possible through lack of appetite if for no other reason. (Bion, 1962a, p. 37)
In Bion’s view we make a ‘choice’ between modification and evasion and this affects
not just what happens in the moment but the whole way the mind develops either into
an organ that is more for thinking, or one that is more for evacuating. This is impor-
tant to notice because the ‘unthought’ (beta element) is not only raw experience yet to
be processed, but can also be highly sophisticated manipulations produced by a mind
that has become expert at ‘regulating’ itself by evacuation. Bion gives an example of
what he calls the ‘purposiveness of the unthought’. He notes that he had found him-
self considering interpretations that were in fact ‘accusatory, or, alternatively, lauda-
tory as if far-fetched with intent to reassure the patient of his goodness in the teeth of
the evidence’ and reaches a conclusion both ‘unexpected and surprising’ that the beta
screen (evacuative manipulations) ‘has a quality enabling it to evoke the kind of
response the patient desires, or, alternatively, a response from the analyst which is
heavily charged with counter-transference’ (1962a, pp. 22–3).
Bion also throws into question an assumption we might make that all the visual
images in dreams are by nature symbolic, when he suggests that dreams can also be

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220 Nicola Abel-Hirsch
vehicles of evacuation rather than modification: ‘not for purposes of digestion mentally
– only as receptacles to contain, to imprison the idea or feeling and then to eject it. In
that case the visual image itself is used as the target for projective identification’ (1992,
p. 66). As with his example of the patient who evoked actions (accusations, laudatory
denials) from the analyst rather than thoughts, the dreams in this example are recep-
tacles that ‘do’ something to the content (imprison, eject) rather than ‘mentally digest’/
think about the emotional experience pressing in on the mind through the dream.
Shortly before the above note was written, Bion had observed the different effect
that projective identification for the purpose of communication can have, as opposed
to projective identification for the purpose of evacuation, the former being experi-
enced as an ‘invitation’, the latter as ‘an intrusion into him to which he feels he is pas-
sively to submit’ (10 August 1959, in Bion, 1992, pp. 64–5). In the latter case the
analyst’s capacity to think has been deadened.
Related to the above differentiation between modification and evacuation, the
South American analyst P.C. Sandler (1997) has described how a-elements can be
transformed back into b-elements – he calls this anti alpha-function. The beta-
elements so created can masquerade as intelligible sense data and often pass unno-
ticed as true beta-elements. ‘They are primarily imitative deeds, words, behaviours
and actions tainted with ego and superego traces with the interference of secondary
process, especially rational thinking that may be regarded as originating from anti
alpha-function . . .’ (p. 49). Clinically, a lack of resonance, depth, associations, being
stuck with manifest content, are good pointers to a move from the symbolic to concre-
tization (beta activity). Sandler shows clinically how this retreat from symbolic func-
tioning can be in order to evade painful depressive-position experience.
Before ending this section I want also to refer to what Bion calls ‘enforced split-
ting’. One characteristic of an alpha-element is its aliveness, in contrast to the inani-
mate or deadened nature of beta-elements. If aliveness is unbearable (i.e. because of
envy or guilt) it can be replaced, Bion suggests, by a split off inanimate materiality:
The patient’s reactions to material comfort are shown by his reactions to the
material comforts, the couch or other amenities, of the consulting room. Why
must he have more and more of such ‘comforts’? Part of the answer lies in the
splitting that was intended, by effecting a separation of material from psychical
comforts, as an escape from fear of envy, either his own or another’s . . .
Envy aroused by a breast that provides love, understanding, experience and
wisdom, poses a problem that is solved by destruction of alpha-function. This
makes breast and infant appear inanimate with consequent guiltiness, fear of
suicide and fear of murder, past, present and impending. The need for love,
understanding and mental development is now deflected, since it cannot be sat-
isfied, into the search for material comforts. Since the desires for material com-
forts are reinforced the craving for love remains unsatisfied and turns into
overweening and misdirected greed . . .
This split, enforced by starvation and fear of death through starvation on the
one hand, and by love and the fear of associated murderous envy and hate on

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 Bion, Alpha-Function and the Unconscious Mind 221
the other, produces a mental state in which the patient greedily pursues every
form of material comfort; he is at once insatiable and implacable in his pursuit
of satiation. Since this state originates in a need to be rid of the emotional com-
plications of awareness of life, and a relationship with live objects, the patient
appears to be incapable of gratitude or concern either for himself or others.
(Bion, 1962a, pp. 10, 11)

A ‘HALFWAY HOUSE’ BETWEEN MODIFICATION AND EVACUATION MET

WITH CLINICALLY: THE ASSUMPTION OF OMNISCIENCE

If intolerance of frustration is not so great as to activate the mechanisms of

evasion and yet is too great to bear dominance of the reality principle, the
personality develops omnipotence as a substitute for the mating of the pre-
conception, or conception, with the negative realization. This involves the
assumption of omniscience as a substitute for learning from experience by
aid of thoughts and thinking. There is therefore no psychic activity to dis-
criminate between true and false. Omniscience substitutes for the discrimina-
tion between true and false a dictatorial affirmation that one thing is morally
right and the other wrong. The assumption of omniscience that denies reality
ensures that the morality thus engendered is a function of psychosis. Discrim-
ination between true and false is a function of the non-psychotic part of the
personality and its factors. There is thus potentially a conflict between asser-
tion of truth and assertion of moral ascendancy. The extremism of the one
infects the other. (Bion, 1962b, p. 308)

Clinical Relevance
For some time with patient B, I interpreted what I understood to be his transference to
a thoughtless object wanting only its own peace of mind. This, however, didn’t
deepen into ‘learning from experience’, and was repetitive. Was I experiencing – not
the patient’s transference – but something more hallucinatory and omniscient in
which the patient was putting himself in a superior position in relation to me? Inter-
pretations along these lines bore more fruit and interestingly enabled unusually com-
panionable silences in which it seemed possible for him then to be with me rather
than believing he must ‘manage me’.
Shortly after what I describe above, I had an experience of hearing a noise from an
adjacent room and ‘all at once’ understanding just how disturbing the patient found it.
I emphasize the ‘all at once’ because that is how we mostly remember dreams – a
dream or fragment of a dream is suddenly there. The patient himself then gradually
began to have more experiences that he could be ‘in’ with me. On one occasion this
involved his feelings of distaste towards me. The following day, however, he returned
in a superior state of mind and declared that he knew of course that his distaste was of

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222 Nicola Abel-Hirsch
my sexuality. The patient was no longer ‘in’ the experience, but was now omnis-
ciently looking down on it. The difference between being ‘in’ an experience and
asserting that one has no need of the experience and ‘knows’ already, can also be
seen in the following quote in relation to dreaming: ‘“I do not understand”, or, “do
not know why”, or “do not know how”, etc. may be taken either as a positive state-
ment of inability to dream, or a defiant assertion of a capacity for not dreaming’
(Bion, 1992, p. 37, emphasis in original).

THE DISCIPLINE OF MEMORY, DESIRE AND UNDERSTANDING

A key factor in the analyst’s alpha-function is the analytic template–theories–precon-
ceptions–capacities to ‘recognize’ the patient’s unconscious material. How do we dif-
ferentiate those things we know to exist from our psychoanalytic experience from
those we bring into existence by our theorizing?
Something that I think was probably operating in Bion’s observations right from
the beginning is honed and described in his later work. This is the observation of con-
stant conjunctions.
By a constant conjunction I mean that in certain circumstances you might
notice that certain elements kept on turning up constantly conjoined; that you
think, for example, that there is fur, claws, whiskers – and you bind the lot
by saying ‘Cat’; the object of that being that once you have bound this
constant conjunction you can then set about researching as superficially or as
deeply as you choose, into what you mean by this term. It is rather different
from the ordinary view – about the ordinary views which are held
philosophically about abstraction. I am really suggesting that you start with
the unknown, that you note a constant conjunction, that you bind it by a
term which is vitally meaningless, and then proceed to investigate what you
mean by that term, for the rest of your life if you are so inclined. (Bion,
1965, p. 7)
From the point of view of observation and research ‘on the couch’, the observation of
a constant conjunction is made prior to the investigation of what it is. The difference
between the two procedures is obviously never clear cut, but it does afford the possi-
bility of making observations which are less theory driven.
Here is an example from Bion’s Attention and Interpretation (1970).

A Married/Unmarried Man
In the first place (working with discipline of memory, desire and
understanding), the analyst will soon find that he appears to be ignorant of
knowledge which he has hitherto regarded as the hallmark of scrupulous
medical responsibility . . . Thus an analyst may feel, to take a common
example, that his married patient is unmarried; if so, it means that psycho-
analytically his patient is unmarried: the emotional reality and the reality
based on the supposition of the marriage contract are discrepant . . .

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 Bion, Alpha-Function and the Unconscious Mind 223
In psycho-analysis such matters as the patient’s marriage have to be con-
sidered deeply. Is an overt practising homosexual with several children and a
wife with whom he has entered into the marriage contract married? (Bion,
1970, p. 49)
Comment: this is not unusual for us – we might expect to have seen that the patient’s
legal state did not match his emotional reality. We might then have begun to entertain
ideas about why this should be. We are arguably prone at this stage to assume we
know about people’s unconscious or hidden motivations. Bion continues:
What matters is that to statements of a particular category (of the grid) the
patient begins to add statements of a different category. The patient whose
statements have at no time suggested to the analyst that he, the patient, is
married, now, at a particular point in his analysis, introduces statements that
indicate that he is; that is to say, he behaves in a way that makes the analyst
regard his statements as belonging to new categories including column 6 (he
is asserting that he has actually done something, resorted to the kind of
statement that consists in actually doing something, e.g. getting married).
Now it is clear that if the psycho-analyst has allowed himself the unfet-
tered play of memory, desire, and understanding, his pre-conceptions will be
habitually saturated and his ‘habits’ will lead him to resort to instantaneous
and well-practised saturation from ‘meaning’ rather than from O. (Bion,
1970, p. 50)
Bion’s recommendation to work with discipline of memory, desire and understanding
is importantly in order to observe, not the flux of moment to moment material, but
constant conjunctions that could become observable if one could put aside ‘the pecu-
liarities that make us creatures of circumstance’. In the example I have given, Bion
recommends putting aside the knowledge of a man’s legal marriage (a circumstance)
in order to observe when ‘marriage’ might come up in the material, and in relation to
what other elements. The conjunction of elements is to be observed before its mean-
ing is then enquired in to. This approach offers the possibility – highlighted in Hin-
shelwood’s work Research on the Couch (2013) – of giving some degree of
separation between an observation, and the ‘transformation’ of the material by the
analyst.

CONCLUSION
I began with the change from something that ‘is not thought at all to something which
is thought’, Donne’s ‘blood spoke in her cheek . . . as if her body thought’.
I spoke about difficulties thinking at all. Whilst Freud’s patients suffered from
excessive repression, Bion’s psychotic patients had difficulties ‘thinking’ at all. Bion
came to understand the patient’s need to have their projections contained by the ana-
lyst, and came to the model of the mother and infant. The human mind is understood
to develop through the mind of the other.

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224 Nicola Abel-Hirsch
I referred to the likelihood that Bion went through a self-analysis, possibly not dis-
similar in importance to him to Freud’s self-analysis – in the working out of his theory
of thinking.
I then went to his view that the mind also dreams when awake and that dreaming,
derived from alpha-elements, brings about the differentiation between the conscious
and unconscious mind. (The processing of experience includes being able to become
unconscious of it.)
I asked what Andre Green might have meant when he said that for Bion ‘the model
of the dream is more important than the model of the baby’? Whether we might over-
use our fruitful theory of object relations and what other factors there might be in
‘dreaming’ when awake and asleep? For Bion these include the capacity to bear frus-
tration as an essential factor in alpha-function/dreaming and to some extent inborn.
Bion thought that a mind dominated by evacuation developed differently to one
dominated by thinking and that in the former we find a purposiveness of the
‘unthought’ beta screen which can nudge the analyst also to action rather than thought
– laudatory or critical speech rather than analytic thought.
I ended with the question of how we differentiate those things we know to exist from
our psychoanalytic experience, from those we bring into existence by our theorizing.
How is our analytic alpha-function to grasp – as dreams can – the significant facts?

NOTE
1. Bion uses both ‘alpha-function’ and ‘alphafunction’, the former version more frequently
used.

REFERENCES
Bion, W.R. (1958) On arrogance. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 39: 144–146.
Bion, W.R. (1959) Attacks on linking. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 40: 308–315.
Bion, W.R. (1962a) Learning from Experience. London: Heinnemann; reprinted London:
Karnac Books, 1984.
Bion, W.R. (1962b) The psycho-analytic study of thinking. International Journal of Psycho-
analysis 53: 306–10.
Bion, W.R. (1965) Memory and Desire. In: Mawson, C. & Bion, F. (eds), The Complete Works
of W.R. Bion, vol. VI, pp. 1–19. London: Karnac Books.
Bion, W.R. (1970) Attention and Interpretation. London: Tavistock Publications; reprinted
London: Karnac Books, 1984.
Bion, W.R. (1992) Cogitations. Bion, F. (ed.). London: Karnac Books.
Bion, W.R. (1997) War Memoirs: 1917–1919. Bion, F. (ed.). London: Karnac.
Bion, W.R. (2014) The Complete Works of W.R. Bion. Mawson, C. & Bion, F. (eds). London:
Karnac.
Brown, L.J. (2012) Bion’s discovery of alpha function: Thinking under fire on the battlefield
and in the consulting room. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 93: 1191–214.
Green, A. (1992) Cogitations: By Wilfred R. Bion, edited with a foreword by Francesca Bion.
London and New York: Karnac Books, 1991. pp. 406. International Journal of Psychoanal-
ysis 73: 585–9.

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 Bion, Alpha-Function and the Unconscious Mind 225
Hinshelwood, R.D. (2013) Research on the Couch: Single-Case Studies, Subjectivity and Psy-
choanalytic Knowledge. London: Routledge.
Sandler, P.C. (1997) The apprehension of psychic reality: Extensions of Bion’s theory of
alpha-function. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 78: 43–52.

NICOLA ABEL-HIRSCH MSc is a Fellow of the British Psychoanalytical Society and works
in private practice. As the recent Visiting Professor at the Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies,
University of Essex (2013/2015), and also through annual visits to Taiwan (2005–2012), and
teaching seminars in the UK, she has explored and discussed the work of Bion widely. Her
writings on Bion include: ‘Freud and Bion on the life instinct’, ‘Narcissism and socialism’,
‘Bion’s containing and Winnicott’s holding’, ‘Sexuality’, ‘On the difference between maternal
reverie and analytic “alpha function”’, ‘The mind–body relation’, and ‘Bion on observation’.
She is the editor of Hanna Segal’s last book, Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow. Address for cor-
respondence: [nicolaabelhirsch@icloud.com]

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British Journal of Psychotherapy 32, 2 (2016) 215–225