An As-If person, according to psychoanalyst Helen Deutsch, who coined the term, appears “intellectually intact,” able to create a “repetition of a prototype [but] without the slightest trace of originality” because “expressions of emotion are formal … all inner experience is completely excluded.”

We all need slips from the unconscious to nudge us to take risks, align our outward selves with the interiors we desire.

In Bion’s theory, the raw emotional data that the infant gives off are termed “beta elements,” which must then be ruminated on, metabolized by an “alpha function,” the mechanism of experiencing emotion from within, digesting it, and putting it back out in symbolized form. Alpha functions process beta elements so that they become available for

But our tendency in daily life is to value thinking, the rule-driven syntax and facts about a person’s existence, over feeling. Those who foreground emotion, the way the mind moves, generally forgo the rewards—chief among them belonging—that accompany thinking that is easily calibrated with the thoughts of others.

The “development of an ability to think,” in Bion’s words, occurs as a way of coping with the thoughts that crystallize from frustrated feelings:

The man then imagines that the person who has seen him peeping through the keyhole knows him as he cannot know himself—knows him, in fact, better than he knows himself. He can now know himself only by reading the other’s knowledge, can see himself only through the gaze of the other. This transformation from being a subject with agency (the one

Unconscious communication is marked by laughter in clown and by emotion in psychoanalysis.

Psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott considers play to be “the gateway to the unconscious,” which he divides into two parts: the repressed unconscious, which is to remain hidden, and the rest of the unconscious, which “each individual wants to get to know” by way of “play,” which, “like dreams, serves the function of self-revelation.”

It's difficult to resist the urge to play the part you imagine other people will find interesting or entertaining, the part you think will receive approval. We all want to be loved. The problem is that you're less likely to connect with others on an emotional level if you're leading with a prototype or idea, an ego communication, rather than with a