Back to Table of Contents
identify to fit it into a part of him/herself. To the contrary, even if the baby’s disposition is normal, when the mother’s containing function is insufficient, the mother cannot understand well and grasp the experience of anxiety projected by the baby. In such situations, what the mother returns to the baby is not integrated and the meaning is confusing, therefore the baby cannot accept it as his/her own meaningful experience. Thus, alongside +K which fosters growth, there is –K implying a symbiotic or parasitic relationship between ♂ sign contained and ♀ sign container, which would be other ways of dealing with the emotional situation as opposed to thought and its consequent growth. That is, a relationship that could lead to mutual destruction. When applying the concept of containment to social systems, Bion described the conflict between the group (or fixed social order, the establishment), with that of ‘the mystic’, the individual bringing a new but potentially destabilizing idea into the group. The individual representing the new idea needs to be contained within the group, but this can lead to the new idea being either crushed by the group or the group falling to pieces under its pressure. With the appearance of –K, there is the presence of envy and feeling of fear, which collaborate decisively for not developing thoughts and the necessary creativity essential to the Bionian model of mental life. The –(♀, ♂) configuration (minus container-contained) leads to growing morality and the emergence of a “super-superego that asserts the moral superiority of undoing and un-learning, and the advantage of finding fault with everything” (Sandler, 2005b, pp. 262-263). In this context it is interesting to note that in his 1970 text “Attention and Interpretation”, Bion refers to the modified Container-Contained, initially presented as a Catastrophic Change, in which there would be expansion of both elements. In his 1970 publication “Attention and Interpretation: A Scientific Approach to Insight in Psychoanalysis and Groups”, Bion summarized and further developed his theoretical system, the contribution on “Containment” seemed modest, but progressively became an important new organizing concept for psychoanalysis. It allowed analysts and therapists “from both sides of the isle” to speak in a common tongue about infant-mother affective, pre-lexical communication. Bion seemed to have opened up a significantly new pathway to the vertex of mental topography with his “Container/Contained”, along with his reshuffling of the functions L (love), H (hate) and K (knowledge), which were to serve and interact with Container/Contained. Hereto the nature of the interaction occurring both within the self and between the self and object(s) was limited to the operation of introjection and projection (later introjective and projective identification). These latter two functions were the developmental precursor of all subsequent defense mechanisms and typified the limitations of the one-person model of psychoanalysis that held that intra-psychic structure was made only of the subject’s representations.
73
Made with FlippingBook - professional solution for displaying marketing and sales documents online