Container Function

Bion conceived of the analyst as a ‘container’ of projected parts of the other-- as mother is for infant-- particularly of intense, negative affects. The extruded parts and affects of the other are what is ‘contained.’ Analyst (as with mother) is not merely a receptive container, but a welcoming and validating one, and, moreover, accepts and modifies them (a part of the alpha function), but does not necessarily interpret them. The ‘container’ ideally dampens these overwhelming affects so that they are eventually amenable to regulation and self-reflection.

Thus, through projective identification (projection and response to what is projected) the analyst has come to know unwanted affects and painful relational patterns, and furthermore attempts to ‘digest’ them and re-present them in a more ‘palatable’ form. We might note the similarity to making use, after the fact, of enactments which bring to light nonconsciously encoded patterns of ‘how to be” in relationship-- except that enactments are made use of by both analyst and patient who intersubjectively process shared experience and co-create any meaning making. An example might be mutual recognition containing aggression because complementarity is no longer at work.

Spezzano adds a felicitous element to Bion’s ambiguous term ‘container’ when he intimates it is: to be held in the mind and meaning system of the other as a protection against psychic homelessness, meaninglessness and chaos. Putting parts of the self in the other may then be an attempt to create holding of the self in the analyst’s mind. In the analyst’s mind, there can be an increased opportunity to co-create context for them, and an increased capacity to safely play with these projected parts, as was the case with a young man-- an avid user of ‘spice’ or K2, but no longer a user of heroin -- who let me feel all the sadness, himself long indifferent (numb) to the pain experienced by the little boy whose mother had left him and his father when he was but six years old (he never saw her again). Tears could stream down his face when I described the plight of an abandoned six year old, but that boy’s sadness was not his own. Through approaching the loss and confusion of a child through the little boy I held in mind, my patient could begin to approach what might have been his own experience.