Concept
Container–contained
Bion's model of a relation in which one thing receives and holds another. In its first form the mother takes in the unbearable feelings the infant projects into her and returns them in a form the infant can bear. Generalised, it describes how the mind holds thoughts, how the analyst holds the patient's projections and how a group holds an individual, and the relation may foster growth or harm either side.
Development
1962
introduced by Wilfred Bion
Sketched in Learning from Experience (1962), given its sign ♀♂ in Elements of Psycho-Analysis (1963) and extended to the individual and the group in Attention and Interpretation (1970).
In Attention and Interpretation (1970);Elements of Psycho-Analysis (1963);Learning from Experience (1962)
2004
developed by Thomas H. Ogden
Ogden read Bion's container-contained as concerned chiefly with the processing, or dreaming, of thoughts and feelings, and set it beside Winnicott's holding, which he read as concerned with being and with the experience of time.
In On Holding and Containing, Being and Dreaming (2004)
Relations
- 1962 introduced by Wilfred Bion
Sketched in Learning from Experience (1962), given its sign ♀♂ in Elements of Psycho-Analysis (1963) and extended to the individual and the group in Attention and Interpretation (1970).
- 2004 developed by Thomas H. Ogden
Ogden read Bion's container-contained as concerned chiefly with the processing, or dreaming, of thoughts and feelings, and set it beside Winnicott's holding, which he read as concerned with being and with the experience of time.
- derives from Projective identification
- diverged into Intrusive identification
Meltzer reserves 'projective identification' for Bion's communicative projection into a receptive container. Intrusive identification is its omnipotent counterpart: it enters the object by force, takes over its inside and does not seek understanding.
Works
- 1962
Learning from Experience, published in 1962, is the first of the short theoretical books in which Bion tried to give psychoanalysis an instrument for thinking about thinking. Drawing on his work with psychotic patients and on Freud's account of the two principles of mental functioning, he asks how a person comes to learn from emotional experience, and why some cannot. To keep his terms free of the associations of existing theory, he introduces signs deliberately empty of meaning, chief among them alpha-function, and treats the personality as a set of functions and their factors. Alpha-function works on sense impressions and emotional experiences and turns them into alpha-elements, which can be stored, used in dream thoughts and in unconscious waking thought, and remembered. What is not so transformed remains as beta-elements: undigested facts felt as things in themselves rather than as thoughts, fit only to be evacuated by projective identification or discharged in action. Alpha-elements cohere into a contact barrier that both separates and joins conscious and unconscious, so that one can be awake or asleep, aware or unaware; where alpha-function fails, a screen of beta-elements takes its place, and the person cannot properly dream, and so can neither fall asleep nor fully wake. The function develops in the infant through the mother's capacity for reverie: she takes in the states the infant projects into her, such as a fear of dying, and returns them in a form it can bear, and the infant introjects the function along with them; when she cannot, what returns to the infant is nameless dread. Thinking begins when an expectation meets frustration: an infant who can bear the absence forms a thought of it, while one who cannot treats the absence as a bad object to be got rid of. Bion describes the links between objects as love, hate and knowledge (L, H and K), and makes K — the painful activity of getting to know something, as distinct from possessing knowledge about it — the link on which learning from experience depends; its negative, minus K, strips experience of meaning and is driven by envy. In the later chapters he discusses how the analyst abstracts models from clinical experience and recognises a selected fact that gives coherence to the scattered material of a session, and he abstracts the mother–infant model into the relation of container and contained, which his later books develop.
- 1963
Elements of Psycho-Analysis (1963) is the second of Wilfred Bion's four theoretical books on thinking and psychoanalytic method, following Learning from Experience (1962) and preceding Transformations (1965) and Attention and Interpretation (1970). Troubled by the distance between what an analyst experiences in the session and the theories used to describe it, Bion looks for a small number of elements, comparable to Euclid's axioms or the letters of an alphabet, whose combinations could represent both psychoanalytic theories and the clinical facts they concern. He proposes as elements the relation of container and contained (♀♂); the oscillation between the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions (Ps↔D), in which a selected fact suddenly gathers scattered data into a coherent whole; the links of love, hate and knowledge (L, H, K); and reason and idea (R, I). A genuine psychoanalytic object, he argues, extends in three dimensions: in the domain of sense, since it can be observed; in the domain of myth, since it can be represented by a personal story such as the Oedipus myth; and in the domain of passion, the intense emotion that shows two minds are linked without violence. To classify statements made in the session, by patient and analyst alike, the book introduces the Grid, a table with two axes. Its vertical axis traces the genetic development of thought from beta-elements and alpha-elements through dream thoughts and myths, pre-conceptions, conceptions and concepts to scientific deductive systems and algebraic calculi; its horizontal axis records the use a statement serves: definitory hypothesis, a falsehood held against anxiety (column ψ), notation, attention, inquiry and action. Bion reads the Oedipus myth as a story about the drive to know and the arrogance of curiosity, and treats its components as elements of a pre-conception. The book ends with an account of reversible perspective, in which a patient appears to accept an interpretation while silently reversing its premises, so that a dynamic conflict is made static and pain is evaded. The aim of analysis, on this view, is not to relieve pain but to enlarge the patient's capacity to bear it.
- 1970
Attention and Interpretation (1970), subtitled A Scientific Approach to Insight in Psycho-Analysis and Groups, is the last of Wilfred Bion's four theoretical books on thinking and psychoanalytic method, after Learning from Experience, Elements of Psycho-Analysis and Transformations. It begins by questioning the medical model: a physician works from what the senses report, whereas the realities an analyst meets, such as anxiety, have no shape, colour or smell, and must be intuited rather than perceived. Bion names the ultimate reality of the session O, the unknowable truth or thing-in-itself, which cannot be known but only 'become'; knowledge (K) can describe its evolutions, but a transformation in O changes the person who undergoes it. To be open to O, the analyst should set aside memory, desire and even understanding, since each fills the mind with what is already known or wanted and blocks perception of what is evolving now. Bion calls this disciplined state an act of faith, and links it to the 'negative capability' described by Keats: the capacity to remain in uncertainty and doubt without straining after fact and reason. He describes the analyst's movement from patience, a state close to the paranoid-schizoid position in which incoherence and persecution are tolerated, to security, akin to the depressive position, in which a pattern emerges and an interpretation can be given. The second half extends the theory of container and contained to the relation between the mystic or genius, who carries a new and disruptive idea, and the Establishment of the group, which must both preserve the idea and protect itself from it. Such relations may be commensal, symbiotic or parasitic, and the same pattern governs the relation between an emotion and the words meant to hold it, as in a stammer that breaks the words apart. Bion also argues that true thoughts need no thinker, while a lie requires one, and discusses the psychotic patient's experience of an unbounded mental space and of the 'no-thing' left where an object was. The book closes by distinguishing language that substitutes for action or thought from a 'language of achievement' that is itself a prelude to growth.
- 1992
The Claustrum: An Investigation of Claustrophobic Phenomena
Meltzer distinguishes intrusive identification, an omnipotent phantasy of forcing one's way into the internal mother to possess her qualities, from the communicative projective identification that Bion described. He maps the inner world that intrusion creates: the claustrum, divided into the compartments of the head-breast, the genital and the rectum, each with its own atmosphere, in which the intruder lives in claustrophobic dread of expulsion. He traces the claustrum's part in narcissism, perversion and addiction, psychosis and the onset of schizophrenia, adolescence and politics, and the technical problems of reaching patients who live inside it. The book closes with an essay by Meg Harris Williams on Macbeth. Its publisher presents it as a companion to The Apprehension of Beauty, and Rebeca Grinberg noted that it calls the identification intrusive, a matter of quality, rather than massive, a matter of quantity.
- 2004
On Holding and Containing, Being and Dreaming
Ogden observes that Winnicott's holding and Bion's container-contained, though among the most important contributions of each, are often misunderstood and confused with each other. He sets out what he takes to be the essential features of each and illustrates how he uses them clinically. Holding, in his reading, is an ontological concept, concerned above all with being and its relation to time: at first the mother safeguards the infant's continuity of being, in part by shielding the infant from the 'not-me' quality of time, and as the infant matures this holding of continuity through time and emotional change is gradually internalised. Container-contained, by contrast, concerns the processing, or 'dreaming', of thoughts that derive from lived emotional experience: it describes the interplay between thoughts, mostly unconscious (the contained), and the capacity to dream and think them (the container).
See also
Linked from
People
References
- Attention and Interpretation1970Evidence for a relation
- Elements of Psycho-Analysis1963Evidence for a relation
- Learning from Experience1962Evidence for a relation
- On Holding and Containing, Being and Dreaming2004Evidence for a relation
- The Claustrum: An Investigation of Claustrophobic Phenomena1992Evidence for a relation