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Esther Bick (1968), Donald Meltzer (1975), and later Didier Anzieu (1989), in a slightly different way, conceptualize the development of a skin-ego having a containing function. André Green (1999) writes about the necessity of a negative hallucination of the maternal function for creating an internal space for symbolization. These latter differ from Bion in that they also call attention to states where psychic space is assumed to not yet have been attained, and to other primitive ways of relating (prior to projective identification) such as primary and adhesive identification. In contemporary psychoanalysis, Ofra Eshel, in her book (2019), set out her extensive experience of an evocative approach converging two of Bion’s seminal concepts (container/contained and being at one with O) with Winnicott’s ideas of fundamental being. The analyst changes the analysand’s capacity to contain experiences that the analysand was unable to bear on his own, through the analyst’s capacity of being radically open to the unknown and the unthinkable. This approach underscores the ontological-experiential dimension of psychoanalysis. It centers theoretically and clinically on ontological experiences of psychoanalytic oneness, while moving through stages of the analyst’s ‘presencing’ (being-there), and the ensuing analysand-analyst interconnectedness or ‘withnessing’ - two-in-oneness, that may deepen into at-one-ment with the patient’s innermost, non-communicating psychic reality. Wide clinical utility of Bion’s concept can be exemplified by the edited volume “The Generosity of Acceptance” by Gianna Williams, Paul Williams, Jane Desmarais and Kent Ravenscroft (2004) who employ Bion’s Container-Contained model while exploring the detrimental consequences of insufficient paternal function in histories of children and adolescents with eating disorders. They posit that a dyadic relationship always includes a third element - the space between the subject and object. This is referred to as the ‘paternal function’, whether or not it is performed by the actual father. They connect a dread of dependency with a need to obliterate otherness through a ‘state of mind of fusion’ and projective identification, in which there is an attack on this ’paternal function’, a denial of space between the dyadic couple and the desire for (and fear of) fusion between subject and object. A further factor is a destructive superego on the side of death engendering persecutory feelings, which are potentially fatal.
VI. WIDE PROLIFERATION OF THE TERM IN OTHER CONCEPTUAL NETWORKS
Some expressed a concern that with a wide usage of various aspects of the concept and its derivations across the broad range of contemporary of psychoanalytic orientations comes a risk of diluting its specificity. (Search of pep-web publications revealed some 6500 papers that use the term “containment”.) Under these conditions, it is important to distinguish usage of
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