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IV. E. Examples of British Object Relations Perspectives in North America Judith Mitrani (1995) expands on Bion’s concepts of containment and maternal alpha function and reverie, transforming raw sensory data (beta elements) of the infant into meaningful thoughts (alpha elements). She provides an astute clinical and theoretical account of how a failure of the mother to perform this role can lead to a disruption in the child’s development of symbolization and the alpha function. James Grotstein . In a complex synthetic discourse, basing himself in Freud (1900), Bion (1970), Chomsky (1968) and Pribram (1971), Grotstein (1979) theorizes that the human infant has to wait for the maturity of his symbolic organization so as to master a vocabulary and the rigors of separation which allow him to make distinctions and integrations of symbolic units, extending the connotations Chomsky has assigned to the inherited deep structures to the concept of the inheritance of the tendency toward an instrumentality of dream expression. Referencing Pribram, Grostein postulates that symbolism seems to be the communicative requirement of the right brain organization, which functions along holistic, space-orienting, contextual, emotional, and visual cues. Extending Bion, Grotstein further maintains that dreams can be seen as the containers of content in which the content is communication which is constantly being revised and redefined by the container – the symbol – which is making newer and varying audience demands on the content. The audience of the dream and the producer of the dream are, therefore, but different aspects of the same symbolic unit. When the audience receives the dream from the container- producer, it signals the producer acceptance, modification, censorship, dream-it-again, etc. The two are in very close contact and relate to "I" as subject and self as object. Theorizing that Bion's concept of the alphabetizing process of alpha function (Bion, 1970) is congruent with Freud's concept of dreamwork, as delineated in Chapter 7 of his Interpretation of Dreams (Freud 1900), Grotstein further deduces his hypothesis of psychotic illness as primarily illness of symbolic processes. According to this hypothesis, the capacity to be psychically healthy depends upon the ability to disassemble the Gestalten of the outside world, to reassemble them in the internal world and to be able to store them as images in the way they are shown. In this context, psychosis is characterized by the inability to assemble these Gestalten to resemble their external counterparts so that the imagery on the internal screen is disassembled, disjointed, dis- symbolic, and in chaotic disarray. The basic problem with psychosis is then that imagery cannot coherently take place and, in consequence, thought cannot be built upon this incoherent imagery. The primary problem with schizophrenia is thus dis-symbolism, the thought disorder being its consequence rather than the other way around, e.g. schizophrenics “cannot paint inner pictures upon their inner screen” (1979, p. 139). Thomas Ogden (1989) has brought about another original elaboration of the sensitive integration of Klein’s and Bion’s contributions (PS<->D). He further extends the work of Bick,
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