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aspects of the manifest communication. The ideogram would comprise the manifest and the latent, "the spoken but not articulated" (Bion 1973, p. 13). In “Transformations”, Bion (1965) forges a highly abstract model of clinical observation, based on multiple interdisciplinary references. Absence creates thought, word and representation. The representation of a state of mind corresponds to frustration. The α-elements make up the mental representation of emotional experience, acquiring the quality of ‘thinkability’ without yet actually taking the form of thoughts: a de-sensorializing function of the mind (α-function). An increasing development of ‘desensorialized’ abstractions (Sandler P.C., 2005) opens up the paths of knowledge. The oldest of these, art, initially preverbal (music, painting, sculpture), perceived principally by the sensory apparatus, must therefore be desensorialized to reach a ‘psychic’ status. It was followed by verbal modes—already a ‘desensorialization’—such as myths, prose/poetry, theatre, philosophy, and science. In “Cogitations”, Bion (1993) describes Alfa function as the process which transforms the immediate sensory experience (‘sense impression’) into material for memory, dream and thinking. Without this transformation the experience remains as Beta elements not able to be thought. The dream-work is presented as a process through which meaning is apprehended. It is built on and transformed at a non-discursive, expressive level, relying on representation through figurative and pictorial images. It is through progression in formal qualities of representation that the thinking capabilities of the affective life develops and become part of the process of what is called metaphorically the metabolization of emotional life. Something expressed on the evocative plane and condensed into a pictorial image is then transformed into verbal language that expresses meaning. Even if the patient dreams, the breakdown of dream- work-α makes it impossible for the feelings to be ‘ideogrammaticized’ and so verbalized. Here enters a new feature depending on whether the pleasure-pain or the reality principle is dominant. If the reality principle is dominant, then the object of the ideogram will be to make the experience suitable for storage and recall; if the pleasure-pain principle is dominant, the tendency will be of an excretable object. So, the process will not be for purposes of mental digestion – 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 and as a missile container for further projective identification. In this case, the aim is not to contain the experience, but to neuter it. Latin American perspective highlights the meaningful connection between representation and transformation , proliferating the whole arc of Bion’s epistemology and clinical observational theories. Bion did not refer most of the time explicitly to the term representation ; however, it appears as a concept implicitly embedded within his theory . His entire theory of transformations presupposes various paths through which an unknowable emotional experience can be represented. This theoretical framework seeks to offer a model of the origin and development of the mental apparatus, in which emotions play a foundational role in psychic life, but in order
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