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in the theory of transformations). This fundamental transformation, from non-mental β- elements to mental α-elements, constitutes the basic process of the theory of thinking. Bion worked through many dimensions of this basic process of transformation, including how the mind disrupts the thinking process in the service of primitive defense (see below). Bion’s approach contends that pre-mental and proto-mental elements stimulate mental development — thinking — in order to manage them. In Bion’s notion of “thoughts that have no thinker” (for example Bion 1967b, VI, p. 201), the pre-mental realm inherently contains the invariant waiting to be transformed into thought. In other terms, the thought without a thinker points towards “the idea of infinitude [which is] prior to any idea of the finite. The finite is ‘won from the dark and formless infinite’” (p. 201). Bion links the concept of primary “thoughts” in part to β-elements (for example, Bion 1963a, V, pp. 80-81), and to the concept of inborn mental organizations called “pre-conceptions” (for example, Bion 1962a, VI, 163-161; Bion 1965, V, p. 175). Pre-conceptions seem analogous in many ways to Chomsky’s early concept of mental deep structure (Chomsky 1965). Bion’s prototypical examples of pre-conceptions are “the breast” (as with the Platonic form triangle, perhaps this might be written more helpfully as The Breast), and the Oedipus complex. Bion proposed that an infant feeding at the breast — an actual situation suitable to function as a realization — has an emotional experience shaped by the innate pre-conception of “the breast”. Bion wrote, “I shall suppose that an infant has an inborn pre-conception that a breast that satisfies its own incomplete nature exists. The realization of the breast provides an emotional experience” (Bion 1962b, IV, p. 337). The pre-conception brings together pre-mental and proto-mental elements with the emotionally experienced function of feeding within the relationship occurring in the realization of an infant at the breast. The breast organizes an emotional invariant for subsequent transformations, which among other functions may organize unconscious object relationships. Bion wrote, “We must assume that the good breast and the bad breast are emotional experiences” (p. 302). To that end, Bion represented the three largest categories of emotionally imbued linking functions as L, or loving, as in a good breast; H, or hating, as in a bad breast, and K, or knowing (see “Transformations in K and O, below). However, thinking does not develop when the breast finds a realization in a contented feeding infant. Rather, thinking arises when the infant is frustrated, and cannot produce a realization to permit satisfaction. For example, when the infant is hungry and no realization meets the pre-conception of the breast, Bion imagines an emotional relationship nonetheless, in this case with a “no-breast” (or No-Breast). The No-Breast relationship links overwhelming and painful emotional qualities of not feeding at the no-breast. These range from frustration to “nameless dread”, or “fear of dying” (Bion 1962a, VI, p. 159), later called “sub-thalamic fear” (Bion 1973, VII). Thinking develops in order to transform frustration and worse; thinking transforms the emotional experience of not feeding at the withholding No Breast. Eventually a realization — mother, her breast, etc. — appears and becomes the incarnation of the pre-conception The Breast. In so doing, it “satisfies [the infant’s] own incomplete nature” (1962a, VI, p. 159)).
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