Dr. Shapiro is an associate clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, on the faculty of the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute, director of the Erik H. Erikson Institute for Education and Research, a charter member of the American Family Therapy Association, the Founder and former Director of The Adolescent and Family Treatment and Study Center at McLean Hospital in Boston, and a former board member of the A.K. Rice Institute. 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.