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What follows is the comprehensive exposition of the concept in its evolution, including many facets of its proliferation in contemporary psychoanalytic theory and clinical usage.
II. ORIGINS OF THE CONCEPT
In “The Interpretation of Dreams” Freud (1900) presents his conceptions about the development of the ability to think, from the experience of hunger (somatic need) experienced by the infant, which ends with the experience of satisfaction arising from external help, giving rise to a perception of nutrition, whose mnemic image is associated, from then on, to the mnemic trace of the excitement generated by the need: A hungry baby screams or kicks helplessly... A change can only come about if in some way or other (in the case of the baby, through outside help) an ‘experience of satisfaction’ can be achieved which puts an end to the internal stimulus. (Freud, 1900, p. 565). The connection between the experience of deprivation and the memory of the experience of satisfaction moves the psyche in the sense of re-cathecting the mnemic image of perception and re-evoking the perception itself, to restore the original satisfaction, which corresponds to the desire. The reappearance of perception is the fulfillment of desire, the cathecting of perception, that is, a primitive form of satisfaction by hallucination, according to the primary processes. The Bionian concept of containment is correlated, in the Freudian model, with secondary processes that evolve from sensory ‘perceptual identity’ (raw, unsymbolized elements, “beta”) to ‘thought identity’ (dream elements with symbolic quality, connected to senses, via condensation, displacement, representability and secondary elaboration, analogous to “alpha” elements). In summary, the containing function concerns the development from a primitive psychic apparatus (reflex), to a gradually greater containment, resulting from thinking. According to Freud (1900): Accordingly, thinking must aim at freeing itself more and more from exclusive regulation by the unpleasure principle and at restricting the development of affect in thought-activity to the minimum required for acting as a signal. The achievement of this greater delicacy in functioning is aimed at by means of a further hypercathexis, brought about by consciousness . (Freud, 1900, p. 602). Indirectly influential were also Freud’s conceptualizations of transformation of pleasure ego into reality ego (1911), re-transcription of memory and transformation of meaning in Nachträglichkeit (1895,1918), thing and word presentation (1900, 1915), transformation of traumatic anxiety into signal anxiety (1926), constructions in analysis (1937) and others. The concept of Containment has its direct roots in the 1940’s England with the clinical research on schizophrenia (psychotic thought disorder), studied by Melanie Klein and her
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