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followers Herbert Rosenfeld, Hanna Segal and Wilfred R. Bion. (The term may also link to Bion’s experience as a war time tank commander. Containment as a military term implies restricting and minimizing conflict on the battlefield without necessarily eradicating it, thus making it more manageable. “Canton” from its French etymology means a territorial division within a country. A related word “cantonment” refers to a permanent military station in Britain and its former colonies in South Asia, less commonly so in the United States.) Klein’s “Notes on Schizoid Mechanisms” (1946) elucidated her view on the pathological fixation point of schizophrenia in the primitive early phase of infant life, from birth to 3 months, what she called the “paranoid-schizoid” position. In this position part-object relations, persecutory and annihilation anxiety, and primitive defense mechanisms such as splitting, projective identification, denial and omnipotence are active. Rosenfeld (1959, 1969) particularly deepened the understanding of projective identification in his clinical studies (1950-1970). He revealed the process in the patient’s infantile, primitive world: patients project the inner objects, part objects and conflictual parts of self into the object – the mother’s breast and body/the therapist – to handle them through the object, subsequently making them part of the self by introjecting them back, and identifying with them. This projection and re- introjection process became a fundamental part of Bion’s research on container-contained. The first incipient references to the Container-Contained theory appeared in Bion’s 1950’s writings, particularly in Development of schizophrenic thought (1956, in: Bion, 1984); Differentiation between psychotic and non-psychotic personality (1957, in: Bion, 1984); On hallucinosis (1958, in: Bion, 1984), and Attacks on linking (1959). Making a reference to the baby’s relationship to the breast, within Melanie Klein’s theory on projective identification (Klein, 1946), he highlights the importance of the adaptation between the mother/her breast and the baby, in confronting the disintegration and death anxiety that the newborn experiences. The satisfactory presence of the container breast is the key when it comes to facing emotions and modifying them, allowing for emotional learning. Thus, Bion’s formulations of the projective identification concept as a primitive defense of the ego evolve into a description of a normative developmental realistic projective identification, implicit in the container – contained model.
III. CONTAINER-CONTAINED (CONTAINMENT): EVOLUTION OF THE CONCEPT IN BION
In 1959 paper “Attacks on Linking” (Bion, 1959), Bion described his experience with a psychotic patient who relied on projective identification to evacuate parts of his personality into the analyst, where, from the patient’s perspective, if they were allowed to repose/linger long enough, they would undergo modification by the analyst’s psyche and then could safely be re-introjected. Bion describes how when the patient was left feeling that the analyst had
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