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be linked together with other mental elements to form narrative bits and associative chains, etc. It is then that they acquire status as representations and can be used to form thoughts and ideas that can be brought to consciousness or repressed into the unconscious because of the anxiety that they arouse. Thus, Bion’s theory of beta elements and alpha function is a metapsychology of the formation, structuralization and growth of the mind. O contains the seeds of future psychic evolution and growth that comes about through processes that are initially intersubjective (maternal reverie, container/contained) and dependent upon the presence of a facilitating object , who lends their own alpha function to that of the patient or infant to form a more effective ‘thinking couple’. Once alpha function is achieved, either through the assistance of another mind or the introjection of the maternal alpha function and the ‘thinking couple,’ then the continuous process of transforming beta elements into alpha elements produces the ‘contact barrier’ and the repressed or dynamic unconscious of Freud becomes possible. This is a process that goes on throughout life. Hence, Bion’s contention that psychoanalysis is the probe that expands the very domain that it seeks to explore. Alternatively, Bion’s recognition that alpha function can be reversed, with alpha elements being cannibalized, evacuated like mental feces to impoverish the mind and the contact barrier replaced by a rigid beta screen, offers a dynamic and dialectical vision of the mind struggling to maintain whatever developmental foothold it has managed to acquire. In the paradoxical statement pronounced by Winnicott (1960) that “there is no such thing as an infant” (ibid, p. 587), one can see to which extent the subjectivity and the unconscious being of the individual require the existence of another subject and depend on the primitive relationship with the environment. A widening of the concept of the unconscious, relationally oriented, can be found in Bollas’s (1987) ‘ unthought known’ , a point of convergence with neuroscience. This is made up by the silent traces of the unrepressed unconscious and the sediments of the individual’s early interactions . It represents a deep relational unconscious form of knowledge which permeates the ‘idiom’ and the entire being of the individual. While Klein’s, Bion’s and Winnicott’s thinking have been strongly influential throughout Europe and Latin America, the reception of especially Klein’s theories in North America has been only gradual and somewhat idiosyncratic. For the most part, until the mid 1970s, classical and contemporary Kleinian papers and ideas were not taught in North American Institutes. This particular fact of psychoanalytic life came about in large measure as the consequence of the unresolved tensions that persisted between the followers of Melanie Klein and Anna Freud, and the happenstance that all of the major European émigré analysts who escaped from Europe and became prominent in the North America were of the Anna Freud’s camp. As a result, until relatively recently, there have been scarcely any Kleinian trained supervisors or training analysts in the U.S. and Canada. (One of the remarkable exceptions is the case of Clifford Scott, a Canadian analyzed by Melanie Klein and trained in the British Psychoanalytic Society, eventually serving as its president before returning to Canada in 1954. Scott left a distinctive mark in London and on three generations of English and French-speaking analysts in Montreal.)
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