She included case material, woven seamlessly through the presentation to illustrate Bion's brilliant but not easily accessible theoretical position. It gives cogency to the view that thoughts are initially empty and must be filled with meaning. Bion's thinking about thinking originally evolved from his work with schizophrenics. He was the first to investigate phenomena which imply the destruction of linking of thought and experience, of symbol formation and verbal intercourse, of attacks which damage the functions which make thought possible. Alpha elements are basic units of thought, concrete thinking about events.
Beta elements are raw sensate body experiences.
Alpha function is the process of generating meaning out of sensations. A thinking apparatus evolves which becomes structure and increasingly is able to abstract and make theories. Failure of alpha function leads to beta elements locked in somatization or evacuated in verbal vomit or dumping. When alpha function successfully converts sense data, beta elements are digested, abstracted, transformed into thoughts with a thinker. Learning from experience then is the essence of Bion's theory of thinking.