Growth and Turbulence in the Container/Contained: Bion's Continuing Legacy

Howard B. Levine, Lawrence J. Brown, Howard B. Levine, Lawrence J. Brown

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781135102845
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Wilfred Bion remains the most cited author in psychoanalytic literature after Sigmund Freud. His formulation of alpha function, waking dream thoughts, his theory of thinking and of the container/contained have proven seminal for the elaboration of psychoanalytic theory and practice, as well as the exploration of psychic functioning and the primordial mind.

Growth and Turbulence in the Container/Contained is based on papers presented at the 2009 International Bion Conference held in Boston, Massachusetts. It represents the state of the art thinking of an outstanding international group of Bion scholars and experts. This book includes the most current trends in Bion scholarship, covering topics that range from the historical/biographical, to the clinical, the theoretical, the developmental, to the cultural and aesthetic.

Proving a vital stimulus to further creative explorations in the field, Growth and Turbulence in the Container/Contained will be of particular interest to psychoanalytic practitioners, graduate psychoanalysts, analytic candidates, psychoanalytic therapists, advanced therapy trainees,and scholars of all schools.

Part 1

INTRODUCTION AND HISTORICAL OVERVIEW

INTRODUCTION

Cláudio Laks Eizirik

The concept of container/contained, built upon the elaboration of the communicative dimension of Melanie Klein’s original description of projective identification, is central to the work of Bion. It is usually acknowledged that Bion developed and expanded klein’s original groundbreaking idea, in such a new and far reaching way that we currently can see how useful this notion can be for the understanding of so many different dimensions, such as the emotional contact of the infant with the mother, the analyst with the patient, the student with the teacher, the members of a group with the group structure, the two partners of a couple, parts of the self, the artist with his or her audience, and so on.

From a historical perspective, we can see Bion, who was in analysis with klein from 1943 to 1953, today as one of the main members of the second generation of kleinian analysts, together with his contemporaries Herbert rosenfeld, Hanna Segal, betty Joseph, all of whom were also influenced by his own work; or we can see him as someone unique, apart from his roots and influences. This is of course one of the many controversies that surround his creative contributions. in my own view, however, bion continued the work of klein, as she continued the work of Freud, as Ferro, Grotstein and the other contributors to this volume, and many others, continue the work of bion, and so on.

At the same time, it cannot be denied that his own theoretical and clinical development grew up after klein’s death and he became more and more a reference and a decisive influence for the analytic thinking and clinical practice of many analysts from different countries.

The idea of projective identification as communication in the process of container/contained, in the way we understand it nowadays, can be found very early in bion’s writings in one of his most quoted descriptions:

Throughout the analysis the patient resorted to projective identification with a persistence suggesting it was a mechanism of which he had never been able sufficiently to avail himself; the analysis afforded him the opportunity for the exercise of a mechanism of which he had been cheated … there were elements which indicate that the patient felt that parts of his personality that he wished to repose in me were refused entry by me …. When the patient strove to rid himself of fears of death which were felt to be too powerful for his personality to contain he split off his fears and put them into me , the idea apparently being that if they were allowed to repose there long enough they would undergo modification by my psyche and could then be safely reintrojected. On the occasion I have in mind the patient had felt … that I evacuated them so quickly that the feelings were not modified but had become more painful … he strove to force them into me with increased desperation and violence …. The more violent his fantasies of projective identification, the more frightened he became of me …. The analytic situation built up in my mind a sense of witnessing an extremely early scene. I felt that the patient had witnessed in infancy a mother who dutifully responded to the infant’s emotional displays. The dutiful response had in it an element of impatience “I don’t know what’s the matter with the child.” My deduction was that in order to understand what the child wanted the mother should have treated the infant’s cry as more than a demand for her presence. From the infant’s point of view she should have taken into her, and thus experienced, the fear that the child was dying. It was this fear that the child could not contain. He strove to split it off together with the part of the personality in which it lay and project it into the mother. An understanding mother is able to experience the feeling of dread that this baby was striving to deal with by projective identification, and yet retain a balanced outlook.

(Bion, 1959, pp. 103–4)

In my view, here we can see the main features of an intimate rela-tionship, and how it can work in terms of containing or not, and this is equally true for the relation between a mother and her baby or the analytic relation or any intimate and fertile relation, as mentioned above.

Several years later, bion described three forms of the container/contained relationship: parasitic, symbiotic and commensal, in these terms:

By commensal I mean a relationship in which two objects share a third to the advantage of all three. by symbiotic I understand a relationship in which one depends on another to mutual advantage. by parasitic I mean to represent a relationship in which one depends on another to produce a third which is destructive of all three.

(Bion, 1970, p. 95)

Judging from the above, it is clear that there is a natural connection between the notion of container/contained, turbulence and growth. in his paper on emotional turbulence, Bion (1977), noting that turbulence usually goes hand in hand with great changes in life, as birth, adolescence, old age and so on, suggested that when a child who looks calm and cooperative becomes agitated, disturbed and angry, this fact is usually understood as pathology, but it can instead represent a necessary change from one mental state to another. Similarly, the analytic process requires a regressive return to an earlier mental state, which is accompanied by a clinical manifestation of emotional turbulence in the patient as well as in the analyst.

Departing from Klein’s theories of infantile fantasy, bion developed his theory of thinking. He used as a starting point the analytic hour, stressing the two principles of the emergence of truth and mental growth. According to him, the mind grows through exposure to truth, and the foundation for both mental development and truth is emotional experience (Bion, 1962).

The notion of container/contained is central for bion’s theory of thinking, which consists of the mating of a pre-conception and a realiza-tion, which leads to a conception and a step in the building of thought and theories.

What the reader will find in this book is a series of papers from authors from different regions, in which the articulations of the notions of growth, turbulence and the container/contained are pursued and illustrated in a very stimulating way, with lively material drawn from the clinical setting, normal development and cultural and aesthetic experience that aptly shows how bion’s thinking opens different vertices with which to observe and develop new ideas.

The international bion conferences originated in the 1990s as several devoted readers of bion began to join in the congresses of the international Psychoanalytical association (IPA) to exchange views and ideas and share concerns, doubts and the mutual experience of working with bion’s ideas. this group of bionian analysts eventually decided to organize a specific conference on his theory and practice that was held in turin, in 1997. in the following years, similar meetings were held in buenos Aires, Los Angeles, São Paulo, Rome, then in 2009 in boston, with the next one scheduled for 2011, in Porto Alegre. Each one of these meetings had its own features and focus, but shared in the common purpose of reflecting on Bion’s ideas and way of analyzing, with great emphasis on discussions in small groups and wide space for the informal exchange of emotional experiences (Trachtenberg, 2011).

At the same time, in recent decades, the psychoanalytic community continues to have the opportunity of taking part in similar kinds of meetings devoted to the study of the work and influence of other authors, such as Ferenczi, Winnicott, Lacan, as well as the well attended French-speaking analysts’ conferences. If we consider that each two years we have an IPA congress, as well as conferences from the three regional federations, and the national congresses, and many others, we might imagine that the psychoanalytic movement is in a state of fragmentation.

In my view, however, these facts of psychoanalytic development offer us still another good example of growth and turbulence in the container/contained. Each institution and congress, in its own way and tradition, provides the containment for the mating of different ideas; each meeting has its peculiar form of turbulence that eventually leads to mental growth.

The current scene—of which this volume is a component—attests to the vitality of psychoanalytic thinking and the several ways of being an analyst and of training new analysts. What is at stake now is our need to develop the capacity to listen to each other and not to get closed in specific small theoretical villages; in this sense, the Bion conferences offer a model for meetings devoted to listening and exchanging experiences across the various schools and regions of international psychoanalysis; they are not closed to a small group of selected guests, but rather open and stimulating free discussions.

In recent years, initiatives like the CAPSA program (analytic practice and scientific activities committee) of the IPA, that fosters clinical and theoretical exchanges among different regions and perspectives, similarly serve as tools for avoiding parochialism and stressing the need for open and objective discussions of our convergences and divergences (Eizirik, 2010).

Thanks to the stimulating and tireless effort of Larry brown, Howard Levine and their colleagues, we had in boston in 2009 a rewarding emotional experience, with all the elements I just mentioned. I am sure that the reader of this book will be able to feel something of that atmos-phere and see how the thinking of bion is stimulating new and talented analysts, who are not only careful readers of the maestro but who also dare to disturb thse universe of the already known in his seminal work. I invite readers to join us and share in that experience.

References

Bion, W. R. (1959) Attacks on linking. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 40:308–15.

Bion, W. R. (1962) A theory of thinking. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 43:306–10.

Bion, W. R. (1970) Attention and Interpretation. London, Tavistock.

Bion, W. R. (1977) Emotional disturbance. In Hartocolis, P. Borderline Personality Disorders, New York: International Universities Press.

Eizirik, C. L. (2010) Analytic practice: convergences and divergences. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 91:371–5.

Trachtenberg, R. (2011) Personal communication.

1

THE DEVELOPMENT OF BION’S CONCEPT OF CONTAINER AND CONTAINED

Lawrence J. Brown

This book is a collection of papers that deal with one of Bion’s most generative concepts—the notion of the container/contained relationship. The reader will discover a wide range of contributions from international writers who have given considerable thought to the many implications of Bion’s theory of the container/contained. AS editors of this volume, howard levine and i have chosen papers that range across a broad swath of topics including, but not limited to, the impact of Bion’s personal history on his ideas, aesthetic applications and clinical implications. Of particular interest are studies of the turbulence that may arise in the container/contained relationship, how this may be understood and worked with in the analytic encounter, in the nursery, and in artistic productions. We believe the reader will find these chap-ters stimulating new ways of thinking that illuminate the richness of Bion’s concept.

But what is a container or the contained and what do we mean by the container/contained relationship? where does the theory of container/contained fall within the accumulated oeuvre of Bion’s thinking? This introduction will explore the development of the container/contained concept, its roots in his personal life and the place it occupies in the evolution of his major theories. we will see that this proposition, which was first introduced in his brief (1962a) paper, “A theory of thinking,” developed from his notion of alpha function that was formulated during a very creative period from 1958 through 1960. So we shall turn our attention first to a consideration of the nature of alpha function.

The Concept of Alpha Function

Alpha function, of which the container/contained theory is a factor, has its beginnings in Bion’s quest to understand the nature of thinking and its disturbances, a question that frames the bulk of his analytic writings. Indeed, his first publication in 1940, “The ‘war of nerves’: Civilian reaction, morale and prophylaxis,” addressed how the experience of battle can disarticulate the soldier’s capacity to think clearly. Bion noted that one unexpressed aim of battle is to evoke a state of confusion in the individual soldier that has the effect of stirring the most elemental unconscious phantasies, beclouding judgment and rendering the enemy unable to think clearly (Bion, 1940). Mind-numbing fear, created by the incessant bombing before a battle, disorients the fighters such that terrifying unconscious phantasies take over cognitive functioning, thereby enveloping them in the “fog of war” that ensues when conscious thought is attacked.

The impact of Bion’s World War I experiences on his psychoanalytic theories has been the subject of recent studies (Brown, 2011b, in press; Souter, 2009; Symington, 1996; Szykierski, 2010, this volume). These are based upon his personal journals (1982, 1985, 1990, 1997) published after his death in which Bion’s military experiences are recounted in often graphic and harrowing detail. Paradoxically, his war experiences chronicled in the diaries are rarely, if ever, directly mentioned in his “professional” writings, which make only oblique references to these experiences, if at all. Nevertheless, it was Francesca Bion (1997) herself who succinctly stated that Bion’s war actions “all formed part of the real personal emotional experience on which his theories lie” (p. 311). For example, in his last paper, “Making the best of a bad job,” Bion (1979) compares engagement with some patients to combat:

In war the enemy’s object is so to terrify you that you cannot think clearly, while your object is to continu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• PSYCHOANALYTIC INQUIRY BOOK SERIES
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Contributors
• Part 1 Introduction and Historical Overview
• Part 2 Clinical Process
• Part 3 Pathological States
• Part 4 Infant and Child Analysis
• Part 5 Applied Studies
• Part 6 Final Thoughts
• Index