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exploring the concept of an alternative sensoriality beyond the senses (Civitarese, 2016), referring to Freud's model of consciousness as a sensory organ for the apprehension of psychic qualities. Beta elements (Bion, 1963, 1970) describe raw sensory data taken in without meaning, while the alpha (or reflective) function processes and digests impressions from the sensorium, giving them sense. His focus is on how emotional experience can be properly represented : somatic pressures, impressions, and emotions at the boundary between the bodily and the mental imply a constant mental activity aimed at fusing them into a visual element — a kind of syncretism — of everything grasped by the sense organs. This mental activity marks the step toward oneiric elaboration, a problem the mind must solve through thinking: the beginnings of linking emotional experience to visual perception and to psychic representation or thought. Beta elements (Bion, 1963) would be the initial pressures the baby undergoes. Then the specific function of the personality transforms sensory impressions and emotional realities into alpha elements capable of being used for mental work — such as thought, dream, imagination, memory. They constitute the first form of representation of emotional experience. In this way, emotions acquire the quality of being "thinkable," though they are not yet thoughts, but ‘proto- thoughts’. The idea of the pictorial image (ideogram) specifically refers to a very early form of mental representation of emotional experiences, the fruit of alpha function (Bion, 1963), that creates symbols by means of figurations for dream thought, as the foundation for and the first step towards thought processes. Bion (1965) holds that emotions are the significant nucleus of experience, which seeks a form and a symbolic representation in order to be thought. Emotions exert the function of connective tissue for mental life and produce the basic links, which allow the integration of the self. For Bion the basic conflict one has to resolve is not between love and hate, but between emotion and opposition to emotion, evacuating the emotional experience. Emotion is the binocular counterpart of thought. The activity of the alpha function ensures that thought and emotion are two sides of the same coin; they are necessarily intertwined in a relational context. Bion considers the essential "passions", "love", "hate", and "knowledge", that coincide with the main forms of relationship of pairs and groups. The syncretic sensoriality would account for this process of interaction between sensation-affect-perception-emotional representation. It is a precursor of emotions, containing the feeling of relation to which one can give meaning, even if it has its root in body sensations. Dismantling sensoriality hinders syncretic sensation and its evolution towards thought. The visual image as a possible point of confluence between perception and representation is especially suitable for conveying and mobilizing emotions and sensations connected to the most primitive psychological development. Exploring the dynamics of image use as a vehicle for integrating sensory and emotional elements into the psychic representation, Bion uses the term Ideogram as an analogy to pictorial representation to refer to non-explained
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