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.

Use Your Illusion: Further Encounters with the Illusive Real

Following on from my previous post on the illusive real, I now think it is important to provide a proper definition of what that is, by virtue of a more in-depth interrogation of what is meant by the concept. I also provide examples of how a deeper understanding of the illusive real has the potential to foster a playful and rich engagement with metaphysical reality.

Firstly, given that the word illusion is associated with deception, it is often considered to be a human encounter with something that isn’t real. Etymologically, illusion consists of the Latin components in(against) and ludere (play), which form illudere (to mock) and finds its way to the English illusion, associated with deception. I will argue in this article, that due to this original antagonistic conjunction, the illusion has become over-identified with its deceptive component and has been divested of its important and meaningful associations with play and creativity. Perhaps more importantly, as a result of this over-identification, experience of illusory encounters are perceived to be outside of reality, whereas I argue, they should be considered very much part of it.

Psychoanalytically, the illusion is either a wished-for internal object, forming part of a necessary developmental process, a psychotic defence, or simply, a common, neurotic, untruth which we tell ourselves as a means of tolerating anxiety. Within this epistemology, the deception must therefore be mourned to see reality. As Winnicott understood, the capacity for illusion signifies the beginning of an important developmental process. In the early stages of life, the infant relates to the breast as-if it were under her control. If an infant is fortunate enough to grow up in what Winnicott calls “the facilitating environment”, which consists of “a good enough mother” who can tolerate the infant’s anxieties, then she can become slowly and gradually dis-illusioned, arriving at a place where she can relinquish the phantasy that the breast is under her magical control. This gradual loss of omnipotence is an important developmental milestone, as it introduces the child to an experience of mourning at the earliest stages of life, and bolsters her potential to tolerate disappointment. It also enables her to have psychological resources at her disposal later in life when she faces difficulty, by providing her with the capacity to think symbolically and play with ideas, to see other perspectives, rather than relying on omnipotent defences such as entitlement, superiority, or concrete thinking, all of which relate to the illusion stage of development. Importantly for Winnicott, this process of dis-illusion and mourning form the basis of the capacity to play; the child no longer only acts as if the breast were under her control, she now realises that she is doing so; she can think about what she does and she has her first encounters with meaning. All of this makes sense, as the illusion – as we have seen, etymologically, signifies a resistance to play, and the incapacity to mourn the illusion not only means the continuation of concrete thinking, but also the attachment to a wish, which is a self-deception. There is, therefore, certainly great value in this process of dis-illusion, as it brings us closer to truths about ourselves, particularly because the way in which we deceive ourselves can cause us plenty of problems later in life.

All of the above provides us with a strong argument for the divestment of the illusion, and this divestment becomes a necessary stage of getting at a truth about one-self - but does that necessarily mean that this truth is “reality” itself? I would argue that there is far more too reality than this: firstly, Winnicott ‘s paradigm contains the implicit assumption that the child’s illusion is “not real”, and he explicitly states that all that the arts or religion are really for is to help us to come to terms with, or sublimate our illusions. This is essentially reductive and myopic, for the illusion not only provides one with a means of accessing as-if states of perception in order to play, but also opens one’s heart to visionary encounters with the mystical, numinous, and the sacred, and to tolerate, enjoy, and find meaning from them; the illusion is therefore part of human experience that is entirely bona fide.

As I wrote in my previous posts on relational presence, the immanent longing of adolescence and its concomitant illusion of eternal love, rather than only being part of a developmental or psychosexual phase that we pass through, also becomes an important experience of an orientation towards a transcendent, metaphysical reality. This profound experience of yearning is both elusive and illusory; hence the hybrid neologism of the “illusive real”. Importantly, the word elusive, like illusion, evolves from ludere, though where the prefix of illusion is against, the verb to elude’s prefix is away from.

If we look at this through the lens of secular materialism, the “illusive” signifier bars access to play through deception in the ways described above, and this access is only granted once the infant comes to terms with the reality of her omnipotent self-deception. However, I would argue that, although the mourning of the illusion can help the child to play due to the newly acquired capacity for as-if states of mind, the disavowal of the reality of the illusion forecloses versions of play which are not based on mourning alone. Moreover, as the illusion is not considered to be real in materialist terms, this compounds the occlusive impact of these two prefixes and forecloses playful engagement with the illusion. If, on the other hand, we can countenance the counterintuitive notion that the illusion is part of the very fabric of reality – which, as an idea, I aver, is inherently playful - then this can broaden and enrich our experience of reality itself. In this way the prefixes of illusion and elude indeed bar us from play and creativity, but this does not mean that we should disengage from them, as if we perceive them only as indicators of hollow deception (not real). Instead, we should do the opposite, and playfully engage with these strange trickster-like elements of language so that we see them for what they are, as sphinx like ciphers which hold the potential of experiences of the unchartered real. This now equips us with a means of engaging with play at a greater depth, and we become more open to experiences of the anomalous, the numinous, the mystical, and the sacred. Children intuitively know how to play in this way, and they engage with the illusive real without any problems. As they grow up, they may become artists, and discover ingenious ways of playful engagement with the illusive real, through Surrealism, Dadaism, ritual theatre, and automatic drawing; they may grow up to become magicians, who engage through the I-Ching, the Qabalah, or tarot cards; the magician is a perfect archetype for the illusive real as s/he represents engagement with play, esoteric knowledge, and eternity.

Whether children, artists, and magicians engage with illusion through play, artistic practice, ritual, or esoteric knowledge, all are driven by a curiosity to know what lies beyond, and, to play with reality. Use your illusion, but remember it is real.

Interview with Taproot Therapy

The Witches' Cauldron: How we develop a 'cursed' identity

The developmental background to the curse position: The primary and secondary curse.

On the Curse Position and Intuition

On the curse position, and how using your intuition in a new way can help you to feel less of a victim of circumstances to move towards a place of agency and creativity.

On Relational Presence (part 1, video)

How relational presence can enrich and deepen our relationships to others

The Devil’s Culpa

In ‘Trauma and the Supernatural in Psychotherapy’ I write about the psychic interplay between guilt and evil that arises in cases of relational trauma.

When one experiences developmental trauma at the early stages of one’s life, one’s caregivers’ needs can easily become confused with one's own. As a result of a complex interplay of factors beginning in the deepest recesses of the mind, the individual feels that they are a ‘bad person’. This is because relational trauma takes place at a stage when one is not yet equipped with the psychological and emotional apparatus to make sense of it. If one’s caregivers are perceived to be responsible for the neglect or abuse that has taken place, this creates a significant deficit in terms of the absence of having a caring mind to help one to begin to make links between events and one’s feelings about them.

As a result of these deficits, and the unthinkable aspects of the trauma, the child unconsciously takes on the ‘bad’ aspects of the caregiver, and then begins to blame him/herself; to ‘take on’ what Fairbairn (1943) calls the ‘burden of badness’. Those who have taken on this burden often feel that they weigh heavily on other people throughout their lives. As a result of this burden, one then experiences feelings of rage, disappointment, or despair as manifestations of one’s badness/ evil, and unconsciously feels that expression of these emotions will only lead to abandonment and compound one’s immanent sense of badness. One begins to see one’s innate needs for love or affection as acts of selfishness, or capricious indulgence. This is the net result of what Ferenczi called 'identification with the aggressor' (1988), to describe instances where the child takes on the guilt of the perpetrator. This combination of guilt and the ‘burden of badness’ then conjoin to form a harsh, punitive conscience.

Satan in Paradise. Gustave Doré

The individual consequently experiences an ontological shame at the core of one's subjectivity (faulty); if something goes wrong, one is ‘at fault’ (guilty); and, finally, is often afflicted by the overarching sense that he/she has somehow invited the actions of the perpetrator due to inherent badness, or evil. This relational process is redolent of the folklore of the vampire: the winged revenant does not, after all, go anywhere without an invitation.

As a result of the developmental trauma and its associated unconscious phantasies, the child consequently feels culpable and evil in equal measures; a paralysing psychic state which, in ‘Trauma and the Supernatural in Psychotherapy', I call ‘culpevility’ or ‘the Devil's culpa'.

Like the vampire, we often think of the Devil as an archetypally evil entity: when we speak of someone as ‘Devil incarnate’, this betrays this perception, as unlike most of us, the Devil lives without a conscience to contend with. In this sense the Devil is only evil, and simply gets on with being bad, carrying out his malevolent deeds without compunction.

However, we may also perceive the Devil through another mythological lens, this time as an outcast, unjustly expelled from heaven. This may feel closer to the traumatised individual’s familial experience of alienation. This version of the Devil is Milton’s romanticised Lucifer, a Promethean hero who rebels against a dictatorial supernatural authority. By drawing on these two different mythological perspectives, we can see how one may take on the disavowed conscience of the ‘evil’ perpetrator (guilt and the ‘burden of badness’), but perhaps at the same time identify with the more Promethean/ Luciferian aspects of them: one feels an affinity with the perpetrator as a ‘co-outcast’: a kind of trauma bond, if you will. This is however driven by an unconscious phantasy that one can somehow replace the ‘evil’ perpetrator with a loving and caring parent, thereby reversing the original trauma. Sadly, in this way one only creates a romanticised and nostalgic ‘pseudo’ tenderness.

Importantly, in having taken on the guilt of the perpetrator, the individual is deprived of agency later in life by confusing his/her own responsibilities with those of others, thereby reenacting the relational dynamics of infancy. As the individual continues to find his/her own aggression unbearable, he/she may only be able to locate feelings of rage in others, or equate feelings of love and tenderness with contempt. This is because the individual feels that they must always defend against the feelings of vulnerability and fear of abandonment that threaten them to their emotional core.

Psychotherapy can therefore help one to find one's sense of agency through a process of mourning; by understanding what belongs to whom, and acquire a temporal sense of where responsibility lies in one’s life story, as one develops a better sense of self and other. Through this grieving process the individual can begin to foster a clearer relationship with one’s ideals aside from being ruled by culpevility. This means that responding to one’s own needs, desires and dreams is less likely to be experienced as a transgression against one’s inner God/ gods.

If you would to like to read more about this subject and matters related to it, my book on trauma and the supernatural is available now.

Fairbairn, R. (1943). The Repression and the Return of Bad Objects (with Special Reference to the War Neuroses). In W. R. Fairbairn, Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality . London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Ferenczi, S. (1988). Confusion of tongues between adults and the child – The language of tenderness and of passion. Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 24: 196–206