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In Container/Contained, Bion developed a unique epistemology of the basic communication between mother and infant, in which the inchoate process of thinking begins with the projective identification of the infant’s ‘thoughts (emotions) without a thinker’ (Bion 1970, p. 104) into his mother-as-a-container, whose reverie and alpha-function transforms them into thinkable thoughts, feelings, dreams and memories. Through such communication, the infant’s alpha function matures, as “it begins to think for itself by projecting into its own internal container-object with its own alpha function…” (Grotstein, 2005). Developmentally and clinically, Container/Contained function shifts by reversal, dialogically, between the two participants. In Grotstein’s (2005) opinion, ‘infant-mother-projecting-container team’ presents an irreducible two-person model, from which previous one-person models based in projection, introjection and/or projective identification may become a default consequence upon failed Containment. In its clinical analogue, the two-person model of Container/Contained includes the presence and activities of the analyst, although it remains centered on the analysand. Once the interactive psychoanalytic scene is thus broadened, to a two-person, there-dimensional landscape, the intersubjective perspective (‘vertex’) could be explored. Containment could now be seen as proliferating many if not all transference/countertransference phenomena, becoming a latent bond (‘hidden order’) between the two (Grotstein, 2011b). In some of his highly theoretical excursions, Bion (1965, 1970, 1992) links his concept of Containment to Plato’s Ideal Forms and Kant’s Things-in-Themselves. Here, the projecting subject activates the specific analogues of Container/Contained with the panoply of L(love), H(hate), and K(knowledge), dormant in their pre-existing universal condition of corresponding Ideal Forms and Things-in-Themselves.
IV. POST-BION DEVELOPMENTS
Psychoanalysts after Bion have discussed, elaborated on, and further developed various dimensions of the Container-Contained model. Some examples of such elaborations and further developments, spanning globally across Europe, North America and Latin America are described below. In England , Ronald Britton (1998) has emphasized how words provide a container for an emotional experience creating a ‘semantic boundary’ around it, while the analytic situation itself provides a ‘bounded world’ and place where meaning can be found. He points out that that the precursors of thought, beta elements, can be projected out of the mind into three possible spheres, into the body leading to psychosomatic dysfunction, into the perceptual sphere leading to perceptual hallucinations or into the realm of action, leading to symptomatic enactments. He elaborates on the possibility of a mutually destructive relationship of container- contained, ‘malignant containment’, where the subject faced with the introduction of a new idea can imagine only two (catastrophic) alternatives, ‘incarceration or fragmentation’.
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