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).