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transference-countertransference paradigms, for various developmental and (psycho)somatic conditions. The Contemporary French-Canadian model of Louis Brunet (2010), an example of a synthesis of both ‘Late Bionian’ (Grotstein, 2005) and French (De M’Uzan, 1994) thinking on the subject, offers a specific clinical construction of this concept. Here, Containment has both “fantasmatic” and “real” aspects that have to be understood jointly. There are intrapsychic and “fantasmatic” aspects in both patient and analyst’s psyches and there is a “real” response from the analyst or the object. Below is an abbreviated taxonomy of five steps leading to an adequate containing response: 1- the starting point may consist of a patient’s projective identification (distressing content expelled/projected into the analyst) associated with the patient’s unconscious fantasy of the existence of a potential indestructible object that would be able to “contain” those dangerous projections and may give back to the child (to the patient) a “tolerable”, “integrable” version of this content. 2- following this first “intrapsychic” movement the patient, or child, adds infra-verbal and verbal communications, attitudes and behaviors, acting as ‘emotional inductions’ toward the subject (analyst, parent). These inductions are attempts to “touch the analyst” to get him to feel and take into himself what is projected (See Grotstein, 2005). 3- The “real” object—the mother, the analyst – must be willing to be touched, impressed, moved, assaulted, in fact used in every way necessitated by the transfer of archaic elements from the patient/child. 4- The mother, the analyst - feels emotions, some consciously, but mainly unconsciously, through identifications. The admixture of such identifications and analyst’s/mother’s own ‘touched off’ anxieties and conflicts, create an amalgam self-object. De M’Uzan (1994) studied this aspect with the concept of ‘the chimera’. 5- This chimera must be “understood and transformed” by the analyst. This work may be seen as “psychic digestion” both of the projections of the patient/child and of the analyst’s/mother’s own conflicts and affects mobilized by the projection. He must then give back a “digestible content,” the danger being to send to the patient a counter-projective identification. In Latin America, Roosevelt Cassorla (2013) has elaborated on the containing symbolizing function of the analyst in the context of chronic enactments (see the separate entry ENACTMENT). He writes of the capacity to symbolize as a product of the implicit containing symbolizing α-function that the analyst uses during chronic enactments. In this context, the analyst’s implicit α-function is the capacity of the analyst to tolerate (contain) the obstructive movements that have invaded the analytic process, without giving up a search for new approaches to understanding of what is taking place, in preparation of future interpretations (of the enactments), if they are to be experienced by the analysand as meaningful. Paulo Cesar Sandler (1997, 2005a) has extended clinically Bion’s concept of the reversal of alpha function, to conceptualize a model of an anti-alpha function, a counter-point
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