On Thinking and Not-Thinking

Sometimes there’s a part of us that would rather not know too much, like noticing a frightening figure in the background of a picture and wanting to look away. When it comes to the emotional world, this ‘looking away’ process shows up in how we unconsciously inhibit our capacity to think by staying out of touch with how we really feel. Over time, feelings begin to develop an alien quality to them, eventually becoming frightening as we let our fantasies about them run wild. We start to develop creative ideas about what lies beneath in the depth of our emotional world, often showing up as a profound terror of what will be discovered. The internal world starts to look like a scary carnival, filled with scary figures we do not want to encounter.

Although staying out of touch with how we feel can bring comfort in the short-term, it can bring havoc in the long-term by alienating us from who we are beneath the various layers of defences built up over time. Like a house getting decorated over and over again, we forget how it looked before aesthetic touches began to reshape it. Getting back to the foundations of our ‘internal house’, by getting back in touch with that which has been repressed, can be a deeply rewarding part of our journey towards self-discovery.

Thinking as a gentle, reflective process

Psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion coined the term “alpha function” to describe the capacity to make sense of our feelings, rather than just defending against them or pushing them away. When our alpha function is well-developed, we can take our raw emotional experiences and gradually transform them into something meaningful. Put differently, it speaks to our capacity to make sense of our internal life which is the basis of how we make sense of the world around us. This ability usually begins in childhood, but is continually developed throughout life, shaped by the people around us and the events we endure. As you might have guessed, trauma tends to disrupt the ‘alpha function’ which is why our sense of meaning and purpose is frequently lost after a traumatic event.

A helpful analogy is to think of the alpha function as the mind’s digestive system. Just as our bodies take in food, break it down, and absorb what we need to grow, our minds need to receive emotional experiences, process them, and find meaning. Without this inner digestive capacity, emotions can feel overwhelming, confusing, or stuck, similar to eating something your body can’t break down. Thinking, then, is a form of digestion. When thinking is disrupted, we end up with a kind of mental indigestion (commonly known as ‘symptoms’).

The difference between thoughts and thinking

It’s easy to assume that just having thoughts, or thinking logically, counts as thinking since we have been taught that one generates the other. But, from a psychological perspective, it is more complicated than that. Real thinking, the kind that involves digesting our emotional experiences, takes patience and effort. It is not about how we apply reasoning to our lives. Logic has an important place in navigating the world, but it is also a way of organising our internal experiences according to a pre-existing map. It serves like a kind of compass which helps with decision-making, an important skill to have in the world we live in. Where it lets us down, however, is in helping us to explore our unconscious emotional worlds which tend to defy logic.

In a therapy context, it getting acquainted with the emotional world might look something like steering focus away from the content of our thoughts to how we think. It becomes less about whether we logically understand why we are the way we are (commonly known as intellectualising), and more about observing the emotional patterns underneath what we think about and how we think about them. 

An important step in developing these observation skills involves slowing our mental process down enough so that we can identify and explore what is going on. For example, a logical explanation for why we are the way we are begins to reveal a need for certainty, which masks an unconscious anxiety. This is a different way of thinking to that which we learn day-to-day. It’s about reading between the lines in search of moments in which the unconscious mind reveals itself. To bring it back to the idea of the ‘alpha function’, it means creating a stronger and more resilient capacity to think, one which allows us to understand what is driving our conscious thoughts in the first place. Think of it as slowly and patiently updating the architecture of one’s own mental “house” so that it feels more like home.

Coming to terms with our unconscious patterns can be daunting, but it is also freeing. When we dare to look beneath the surface, we gain access to the parts of ourselves that might have felt hidden, messy, or even a little bit scary. More often than not, the scary figure isn’t actually scary at all. It just looks scary because we turn our gaze away from it and let our imagination distort it over time. This process of self-discovery can help us understand how we got to where we are and what choices need to be made to get to where we want to go.