An essay on Bion's beta function.

Among the major theorists studying the effect of the external world on the individual, none had a more ambiguous relationship to the psychic manifestations of the environment than Wilfred Bion. On the one hand his theory of the mind contained a new concept, beta elements, to depict the intrusion of the material world into the mental sphere, while on the other he radically opposed the use of sensory perception as a source for clinical insight. The author examines this dichotomy as an outgrowth of her interest in the place of external reality in psychoanalytic theory.

Life is not a dream: the importance of being real.

This paper explores the value attached to "being real," how it is used in various contexts, and how this value persists outside the purview of reality testing or other objective criteria. It addresses how we view the form of a dream and other illusions of reality, including fetishes, whose sole value resides in their material reality. With Proust's description of the experience of tasting a madeleine (compared with the indistinctness of highly charged emotional memories) and a clinical incident as examples, it is possible to assess the important role the search for perceptual identity plays in making the past come to life.