Learning from Experience

Alpha Function and Artificial Intelligence

It is obvious to say that – and even rather banal to do so at this stage in the game – that we are in danger of losing our capacity to imagine, think, and the motivation to create things for ourselves by ourselves. In this short essay, I hope to do something at least slightly more interesting than that, by providing examples of ways which a few of the psychoanalytic concepts created by Wilfred Bion can be re-vivified in this context in order, not only to offer important perspectives in terms of the perils of handing over various forms of mentation to AI, but also as an essential reminder of why particular aspects of consciousness are so closely associated with human vitality in the most profound and urgent sense.

Bion calls the capacity to convert sensory impressions into thoughts and ideas “alpha function”. For him, importantly, the development of alpha function is predicated on a relationship in which the infant experiences his frustration (e.g. hunger, the need to defecate, sleep) as tolerable, due to his mother’s[1] awareness of his feeling states, and her capacity for “reverie”. Her reverie allows her to enter states of the unnamable dread alongside the infant so that they can be named and born(e): this is the template for what Bion refers to as “learning from experience[2]”. The mother’s reverie is also linked to her love for her child and her concomitant capacity to tolerate his distress; it allows her to “dream” his emotional experience into life - from sensory impressions into “alpha elements” - primitive, seedlings of thoughts that can be born into ideas for creation.

Following repeated and incremental cycles of alpha function experienced in concert with his mother, the infant then “learns from experience” for his own intra-psychic use, and grows to intuitively bring it to bear, not only for the purposes of thinking, but for acts of creation. “Alpha elements” then, are the psychic fabric that evolve into the tapestry of dreams; indeed, importantly for Bion, whilst one is alive, one always dreams; whether asleep, or awake; without them we can do neither. Moreover, alpha elements remain active as we “dream” our way through our days, generating thoughts and ideas through rhizomatic associations and processes - much of which we are not aware.

Alpha function and the capacity to think one’s own thoughts are contingent upon tolerance of emotional frustration; if sensory impressions are felt to be intolerable, they cannot be transformed into alpha elements and are thus rendered psychically homeless; neither residing in the dynamic conscious or unconscious, morphing into what Bion calls “beta elements”; the stuff of free-floating anxiety, circular hypochondria, or nightmarish, nameless dread. Beta elements are unheimlich (unhomely) threats which distort consciousness so that ideas become conflated with “living things” in the mind; yet these “things” are paradoxically not yet “born” as they cannot be symbolized for the purposes of thinking; they are felt to be undigested dead matter, divested of the psychic nutrition of alpha function, and antithetical to creation. Beta elements are therefore reminders of primitive thoughts and feelings that were felt to be too terrifying to be given life; far too horrific to even contemplate.

I am not yet born; O hear me.
Let
not the bloodsucking bat or the rat or the stoat or the
club-footed
ghoul come near me.

Prayer Before Birth, Louis MacNeice

The absence of alpha function and an encroachment of creeping beta elements provide us with a conceptual model to think about the rapidly increasing reliance on artificial intelligence and the casual rejection of the ordinary cog-turning pleasures of thinking. Thinking has been under attack for some time, and it is now starting to feel a bit too much like hard work. As many news reports now inform us, we now face unprecedented levels of cerebral decomposition, described by metaphors such as “AI slop” and “brain rot”. Although these pithy epithets may initially come across as benign memes, they should be seriously heeded as warnings of a frankly sinister process of mental and spiritual deterioration. A widespread incapacity to tolerate the inevitable frustration that accompanies thinking means that we cannot any longer “digest” our thoughts so that they are “born” into ideas; they become beta. As a result, we outsource alpha function to the machine, and although it might provide us with ideas or hypotheses which are undoubtedly of some use, what happens to what is left over; the unthought thoughts, the ideas that might have been - do they become slop too? Herein then lies the real danger: Thoughts are acts of creation, they are life-affirming, and in handing over alpha function to the machine, we only affirm the opposite.

As we become increasingly less able to tolerate frustration and boredom, and consequently rely on ChatGPT or its equivalent, general capacity for alpha function is eroded, and this brings us to the next important reason why we must strive to cultivate it. Alpha function has a significant relationship to what Bion calls the “contact barrier”[3].: The formation of said barrier means that transforming sense impressions into alpha elements has a secondary function: the creation of a mediating zone between conscious and unconscious, inner and external reality. Our relationship with AI (if we are to call it that) threatens to erase this contact barrier by replacing it with inter-machine contact.

As we all know, it is now common to “ask” ChatGPT (or whatever you use) for ideas for a poem, stories, essay etc., and this can easily be justified as a benign auxiliary “tool”. Nonetheless, bots are all too quickly and insidiously starting to become “friends” - we begin to treat them “as-if” they were human; we might, for example, begin to notice impulses to include “please” and “thank-you” in our ChatGPT “requests” as we don’t wish to upset our new “friend”. There is nothing wrong with being polite - right? Yet aside from any concerns regarding the sinister and aggressive implications of AI becoming a “master” down the line and the relatable paranoia it engenders, there is also a sad reality to these inter-machinic dynamics, particularly the treatment of the bot as if it were human and the development of an “I-thou” relationship with an “it”.

Make no mistake here: our “as-if” function is related to play, creativity, and the imagination, and was hard won in the fires of infancy. It should not need to be said therefore, that the symbolic function which makes us so unique should not be parted with so readily and unthinkingly; it is a very worrying example of how easily what makes us human, and the frailty of our imaginations could become the very things which lead us to our subjugation to the machine.

To conclude then, the inter-machinic dynamic represents not only a flattening out of the contact barrier, but also the distinction between conscious and unconscious processes, inner subjectivity, and external reality; all of which means that “the thing” (the bot) has taken over. As a result of the increasing rejection of alpha function and the threadbare nature of the contact barrier, combined with the subservient attachment to AI and its derivatives, while we unwittingly provide bots with human attributes, we ourselves begin to resemble the machine: neither sleeping nor waking.

Notes

[1] Mother here represents the caregiver in general, whoever it may be.

[2] Learning from experience is a complex term and a full definition of its use is beyond the scope of this essay.

[3] This is not conceptually the same as Freud’s “contact barrier”.

References:

Bion, W.R. (1962). Learning from Experience. London: William Heinemann.

Bion, W. R. (1970). Attention and Interpretation: A scientific approach to insight in psycho-analysis and groups. London:Tavistock Publications.

Psychic Exuviae: Adverse Childhood Experience and Creativity (Part one)

Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought: So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.

T.S. Eliot, East Coker.

After reading and enjoying John Bowlby’s excellent, but brief essay “On Knowing What You’re Supposed to Know and Feeling What You’re Not Supposed to Feel”, I felt compelled to spend some time meditating upon its message, particularly as he highlights essential links between adverse childhood experiences and the capacity to think about them.

As Bowlby poignantly elucidates, if a child is raised in an environment where the veracity of her thoughts and feelings are frequently called into question, then a widening gyre of unreality exponentially widens as she grows up. In the first part of this essay, I will explore the relationship between this pivotal early experience and its relationship to the capacity to think and create, using the metaphor of what I call “psychic exuviae”. In part two, I shall describe ways in which people who have experienced adverse childhood experiences can foster ways of being which can help them to make sense of their experiences, and within which anxieties felt to be hitherto unbearable, can be tolerated.

“Children not infrequently observe scenes that parents would prefer they did not observe; they form impressions that parents would prefer they did not form; and they have experiences that parents would like to believe they have not had. Evidence shows that many of these children, aware of how their parents feel, proceed then to conform to their parents’ wishes by excluding from further processing such information as they already have; and that, having done so, they cease consciously to be aware that they have ever observed such scenes, formed such impressions, or had such experiences. Here, I believe, is a source of cognitive disturbance as common as it is neglected” (Bowlby, 1979, italics my own).

Perhaps because of Bowlby’s partial rejection of psychoanalytic epistemology at the time of this paper, combined with his enthusiasm for cognitive psychology, he ergo placed too much emphasis on cognitive disturbance as a result of environmental experiences, and therefore underplayed the role of intra-psychic dynamics, and their role in said disturbances.

Let us begin then by considering what it is that happens to a child’s nascent ego when she is told that something did not happen, or did not happen in the way that she experienced it. As Bowlby points out, the child needs to “exclude from processing” what has happened to her. Yet what I want to understand more fully here, are the actual mechanisms of this “exclusion”. I would argue that these cannot be accounted for at a cognitive level, because, as we will see, there is no cognitive apparatus available.

In the scenario which Bowlby adumbrates, the child must find a way to erase or evacuate (get rid of) the original thoughts she has had about it. This leaves a “gap” left in lieu of where these thoughts - and her feelings about those thoughts - formerly resided. This is a troubling confrontation with reality for the child, because she will come to understand that either a) the event did not happen at all (it was imagined and the gap remains), or b) it happened in a different way that the child perceived (a new substitute thought is placed in the gap). It is also important to consider what happens to this “gap” - the place in the mind which the original thought(s) inhabited (before the thought departed). André Green describes this “gap” as:

a “blank hole” in the mind, which not only acts as an inner void but also has a power of attracting all mental contents or thoughts that are linked with the main topic in the centre of the blank hole (Green, 1988).

For Wilfred Bion, (whose ideas influenced Green’s), this “blank hole” is a “no-thing”, a negative space which cannot be tolerated (1984a). In the developmental case I illustrate here, the thoughts or ideas associated with the original event are sucked into the “no-thing” space and become mentally intolerable, and, significantly, cannot be represented by words or images (Bion, 1984;1984a). Moreover, I would argue that where psychic trauma is involved - such as the scenario Bowlby has outlined - there is a residue of what has been erased at the centre of the “no-thing”, and this residue is analogous to the exuviae of the cicada or dragonfly; these discarded “exoskeletons” are hollow copies of the fully formed body they will go on to develop. Exuviae are found clinging to trees (cicadas) or on plant stems close to water (dragonflies), eerily holding on to life, sustained as a presence in absence (no-things, incapable of “life” through representation), a reminder of what once was, until their translucent, brittle surface crumbles into dust between one’s fingers -and then disappears.

Unlike insect exuviae, their psychic counterparts remain at the centre of the “no-thing”, a pseudo space which appears to be an opening for potential thought, yet paradoxically precludes thinking altogether; here the original truth however “clings on” as a failure in re-presentation. These psychic exuviae go on to haunt the sensible world, producing affects and sensations which cannot be digested, only evacuated, passing from the body directly into the “outside” (Green, 1988).

Once insect exuviae are discarded, their carcasses no longer have a body to live them; their psychic counterparts do not have a mind to think them - or perhaps more appropriately - they cannot find a mind to think them. As psychic exuviae cannot be thought about, they are experienced as obtrusive and must be expelled. As Green puts it, they remain paradoxically “permanently in the mind but is in a state of exclusion.” (ibid.) This is indeed a maddening paradox in terms of its relationship to adverse childhood experience: from this perspective it is an attempt made by the child to evacuate an uncomfortable truth, or one which is deemed to be unacceptable, yet the residual reality clings on.

This process essentially has a significant bearing on the individual’s capacity to hold thoughts and feelings about things in mind, and, perhaps most significantly, in terms of the development of the capacity to keep those thoughts and feelings about things alive in one’s mind: if a child knows – even an “unconscious knowing” such as with procedural memory – that when she has thoughts, that they are vulnerable to attack, then she may lose hope and feel that she does not have the psychic and emotional apparatus to keep her own thoughts alive; to preserve her subjective reality. This has a consequential impact on the belief and value of her own ideas which feel brittle, for she knows they can easily be destroyed, just as she discovered when she was first told that an adverse event did not happen at all, or not as she experienced it. The outside world then became a threat – she learned that it was not safe to put things out there, to find the courage to create, to breathe life into her thoughts and ideas for fear of negation (erasure), or substitution by another thought or idea, though one that ultimately is not felt to be true. Furthermore, there is an inherent fear that “putting thoughts out there” - a positive act of creation - is conflated with the negative evacuation of the psychic exuviae, and she then suffers from a foreclosing anxiety that even her most creative thoughts are toxic. As Winnicott put it, it becomes impossible “to populate the world with samples of his or her own inner life” (1963).

Another significant factor here which contributes to the development of these “no-thing” spaces in the mind and the residing exuviae, is the absence of a caregiver who was able to use what Bion calls his/her “reverie” function in order to transform the exuviae into thinkable thoughts – analogous to the metamorphosis of the dragonfly from exuviae to a living, fully formed being. For Bion, the caregiver needs to tolerate the affective reverberations of the “no-thing” so that the child’s primitive frustration can be tolerated, as well his/her own. Bion further illustrates this ability to access states of reverie and toleration of frustration by invoking John Keats’ notion of “negative capability”: the toleration of “uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts” (2002). Keats’ concept is also pertinent to adverse childhood experience, because children who were fortunate enough to have caregivers who were able to access states of reverie and negative capability, and did not either feel overwhelmed by dread themselves, or, instead, as Keats put it , were not “irritably reaching after fact and reason”, are more likely to subsequently tolerate life when things do not seem to be going their way themselves, and able to think about their experiences and make sense of their feelings within a wider context of reality.

For those who have not benefitted from the containing minds of such caregivers, adverse events are rendered unthinkable as the exuviae continue to obstruct the space for reverie, and “negative” states such as mystery and doubt, are experienced as threats (things in themselves), rather than spaces of fertile potential.

In the second part of this essay, I shall consider the ways in which the exuviae can be finally mourned and their associated ghosts laid to rest, allowing negative capability to be nurtured, and concomitant states of mystery and doubt, not only tolerated, but perhaps even enjoyed.

References

Bion, W.R. (1984). Attention and Interpretation (1st ed.). Routledge.

Bion, W. R. (1984a). Transformations. Karnac Books.

Bowlby, J. (1979) ‘On knowing what you are not supposed to know and feeling what you are not supposed to feel’, The Canadian Journal of Psychiatry, 24(5), pp. 403–408.

Green, A. (1998) ‘The primordial mind and the work of the negative’, The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 79(4), pp. 649–665.

Keats, J. (2009) Selected Letters. Edited by R. Gittings and with a new Introduction by J. Mee. New ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press (Oxford World’s Classics).

Winnicott, D. W. (1965) ‘From Dependence towards Independence in the Development of the Individual (1963)’, in The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment: Studies in the Theory of Emotional Development. London: Hogarth Press, pp. 83–92.