Sueli Regina G. Rossini's Paper

ALPHA FUNCTION AND SLEEPING DISORDERS:
A PSYCHOANALYTICAL STUDY
OF TWO PERSONS WITH INSOMNIA

Sueli Regina G. ROSSINI

In recent past, sleep and its disorders have been intensively studied by multidisciplinary teams composed by neurologists, psychiatrists, psychologists, dentists and many others. These studies appointed to the importance of sleep among other living functions. I have been working for some years in adult psychotherapy and I have heard frequently complaints of patients with sleep disorders. The most frequent difficulties are related such as insomnia, somnambulism, awake feeling tired, frequents nightmares and dream absence. Among these complaints, insomnia is a symptom frequently mentioned, and it can be described as difficulty to asleep, to awake early morning and do not get sleep again or total impossibility to asleep. The health professionals, neurologists principally, have been studying for the last 10 years, the sleeping disorders and its consequences to the quality of people life (SOUZA, 1995). Through those kind of studies, most of then on the context of a medical point of view, have been possible to get progress in the comprehension of this disease and its different manifestations: sleepless, somnambulism, nightly terror, breathlessness, narcolepsy, nocturnal enuresis and many others.

Sleeping and dreaming are connected. According to Freud, wishes can arresting the sleep, and dreams, as a way of wishes' realization, give permission to sleep. "The dreams are sleep protectors" (FREUD, 1900, chap. XVIII, Tome I, p. 747). According to Bion, the dream is a kind of thought. Dreaming is an essential psychic activity, the beginning of sense of emotional life itself and gives origin to the most abstracts forms of thought and its verbal expressions, according to FERRO (1995).

Through analysis of psychotics, BION (1957) postulated the existence of a psychotic part and a non-psychotic part of personality. So, in every people, these two parts could be existing and have a kind of alternation. Even than in people considered as a normal person, a psychotic part does exist and makes presence in moments of strong anxiety, arresting the normal working of thought, as much looking as sleeping. In his papers, Bion developed a theory about "to think", where the possibility of looking and sleeping has a connection with the contact-barrier. Contact-barrier is the name that Bion gave to the result "of an association formatted by alpha elements, which appoints the border of contact and separation between conscious and unconscious, and, as a permeable membrane, preventing that fantasy has a prevalence under the reality" (ZIMMERMAN, 1995, p. 55). Therefore, the contact-barrier is a product of alpha function, that transforms the sensory in alpha elements, which can be used to think. "A contact-barrier is developed when sensorial impressions are transformed in alpha elements, able to render oneiric thought or unconscious looking thought" (BLEANDONU, 1993).

According to Bion's papers, principally in the 1958 one's, "About hallucination", we can understand the somnambulism like a psychic manifestation, seemed like hallucinations, which make part of a mechanism, in order to evacuate anxieties and surfeit of inducements not digested by alpha function. The apparatus of perception does an evacuation of archaic mental contents, which could not be transformed by alpha function from beta to alpha elements. These mental contents might be the beta elements, which do not serve to thinking or dreaming neither, they only serve to be evacuated by massive projective identification. The beta elements are utilized in delusions and hallucinations because their vivency is like been concrete, "thing-itself". The evacuation of beta elements is through the sense organs, which having they function inverted, split-off beta elements. Beta elements form a Beta Screen in which there is no discrimination capacity to confront the separation between myself and other, past and present; the screen results from the intensification of projective identification. While the contact-barrier is something inside patient's mind, giving permission to dreams and so the sleep, the beta screen is something that occurs between patient contact with the world.

With knowledge of Bion's ideas about Thinking Theory and psychotic functioning, I am interested to make a study about complaints of sleep disorders in cases with sleepless and nightmares, to know how the thinking is structured and how the dynamic thinking is constituted by these sleepless subjects.

CLINICAL MATERIAL AND METHOD
(omitted here)

FINAL COMMENTS

Those patients live in a world, as described by BION (1957), full of bizarre objects, constituted by fragments which were belched by massive projective identifications. The perception, formation of the thought and reality of the bizarre objects, were strongly attacked and the links of sensorial impressions to reality as well, so, there is a destruction of the thinking apparatus. On this way, the person can not make use of thought as a from to deal with the anguish. A depressive patient tell me that she can sleeps, but she always awakes feeling more tired than before. In the analytical work we can observe that he thought that she was sleeping, because she was laid down with his eyes closed, but actually he was in a improper mental state to sleep and appropriate to hallucinate. In "A etérea leveza da experiência [The ethereal lightness of experience]" TRINCA (1991) said that "to dream is the dreamer process of interior transformation, which gives new possibility of sense to the facts. Establishes a dynamic of new synthesis, which opposes to let things the way they are, and to compulsion, and to repetition. Is a transforming environment to psychical evolution" (p. 33-34). The possibility to dream, which takes to the transformation, is damaged in front the object persecutory, so, there will be no more dreams, just evacuations. According to BION (1958), the patient can tell us about something that she characterizes like dream, in function to guessing that she was dreaming, because she was laid down with her eyes closed. In matter of fact, it would be hallucinations. He also affirms, in "The learning with experience" (1962), that dreams are products of alpha function, so, the impossibility of dream would have, as factors, the excessive anguish and intolerance to frustration. It seems like the situation of the manageress patient, when she goes to get some sleep, she has terrible hallucinations and her only way to avoid them is not to sleeping, not laying dawn.

The first patient also has denied his sleep necessity, as a defence to not sleep, because in order to do it, he would have to dream and he needs to maintain the alpha function working for dreaming.

The analysis of these two cases, according to Bion's psychoanalytic framework, suggest that sleeping disorders is connected to the predominance of psychotic part of personality, a internal world full of wrecked objects, bizarre objects, mobilizing intense anxiety and not providing elements for sleeping and dreaming, but just evacuating them and hallucinating them. The development of Freud and Melanie Klein ideas, performed by Bion, principally in questions which talk about to the pathological use of projective identification and to the theory of alpha function, make us possible to amplify the comprehension about the sleeping disorders and the specially insomnia.

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Sueli Regina G. Rossini