group, pairing, exists on the assumption that the group has met for the purpose of reproduction—the basic assumption that two people can be met together for only one purpose, and that a sexual one'. Two people, regardless the sex of either, carry out the work of the group through their continued interaction. The remaining group members listen eagerly and attentively with a sense of relief and hopeful anticipation. Bion considered that "the three basic-assumption groups seem each in turn to be aggregates of individuals sharing out between them the characteristics of one character in the Oedipal situation". Behind the Oedipal level, however, Bion postulated the existence of still more primitive, part-object phantasies; and "the more disturbed the group, the more easily discernible are these primitive phantasies and mechanisms". Such phantasies would prove the main focus of Bion's interest after his second analysis. Bion on thinking "During the 1950s and 1960s, Bion transformed Melanie Klein's theories of infantile phantasy...into an epistemological "theory of thinking" of his own." Bion used as his starting point the phenomenology of the analytic hour, highlighting the two principles of "the emergence of truth and mental growth. The mind grows through exposure to truth." The foundation for both mental development and truth are, for Bion, emotional experience. The evolution of emotional experience into the capacity for thought, and the potential derailment of this process, are the primary phenomena described in Bion's model. Through his hypothesized alpha and beta elements, Bion provides a language to help one think about what is occurring during the analytic hour. These tools are intended for use outside the hour in the clinician's reflective process. To attempt to apply his models during the analytic session violates the basic principle whereby "Bion had advocated starting every session 'without memory, desire or understanding'—his antidote to those intrusive influences that otherwise threaten to distort the analytic process." Alpha elements, beta elements, and alpha function Bion created a theory of thinking based on changing beta elements (unmetabolized psyche/soma/affective experience) into alpha elements (thoughts that can be thought by the thinker). Beta elements were seen as cognate to the underpinnings of the "basic assumptions" identified in his work with groups: "the fundamental anxieties that underlie the basic assumption group resistances were originally thought of as proto-mental phenomena...forerunners of Bion's later concept of beta-elements." They were equally conceptual developments from his work on projective identification—from the "minutely split 'particles'"