IPA Inter-Regional Encyclopedic Dictionary of Psychoanalysis

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synthesizing Freud, Green, and Winnicott with Bion’s model of containment, together with findings of an early attachment era triangulation (Fivaz-Depeursinge & Corboz-Warnery 1999), underlying the crucial role of the father in the transference, has been found helpful in breaking the inter-generational chain of transmission of postpartum depression between mothers and adult daugthers (Papiasvili and Mayers 2017). The transformation proceeds from sensorial and visceral imprints, enacted, interpreted and subsequently symbolized in a dream, which is interpreted again, by both the patient and the analyst (Papiasvili 2016). In an extended contemporary Freudian network, Ehrlich, L. T., Kulish, N. M., Hanly, M. A., Robinson, M. & Rothstein, A. (2017) are utilizing the concept of containment in the context of psychoanalytic supervision and consultation, in a three-step process: recognition, containment and effective use of parallel processes within the multiple transference- countertransference fields between the therapist/patient supervisor/supervisee, and corresponding pressures and fantasies related to the institutional structure. Containment is here conceptualized specifically as a preventative measure of thus multiply determined potential for enactments. This follows previous conceptualization of psychoanalytic supervision as the container-contained relationship by Virginia Ungar and Luisa Ahumada (2001). Within the broad conceptual framework of Self psychology, historically relevant may be Kohut’s conception of the building up a cohesive sense of self through selfobject transference, and identification, and processes of “transmuting internalization” (Kohut, 1977) . In contemporary Self psychology, Hans-Peter Hartmann (2004) sees containment as similar to the Self psychology’s concept of early affect mirroring and mentalizing, predicated on the “regulative function of an archaic selfobject” (p. 254). However, according to Grotstein (1981b), containment in Bion needs to be distinguished from Kohut’s mirroring, because “Bion’s conception is of an elaborated primary process activity which acts like a prism to refract the intense hue of the infant’s screams into the components of the color spectrum, so to speak, so as to sort them out and relegate them to a hierarchy of importance and of mental action. Thus, containment for Bion is a very active process which involves feeling, thinking, organizing, and acting” (ibid, p.134). VII. INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDIES According to Bionian scholar Paulo Cesar Sandler (2005a), a relationship between emotional and intellectual growth has been acknowledged by both Freud and Klein. Sandler credits René Spitz and John Bowlby for pioneering the studies, providing proof of this relationship in specific ‘privation settings’. Many developmental and neurodevelopmental studies which followed provided further confirmation of this link. However, it was Bion’s theory of Container-Contained that “furnished insight about how this relationship functions at its inception. Emotional and intellectual growth are put into terms of the relationship between the infant and the breast in its most minute features. It does not state the relationship as a matter

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