The Containing Matrix of the Social

This paper is an experiment in cultural analysis. Rather than use an artifact, such as a novel, film, or painting, we will base our analysis on two personal experiences. An artifact, which is available to anyone, has the advantage that anyone could compare what we say about it with his or her own view, and arguments could be tested against each other. The advantage of personal experience is that the theory is part of it, an account of it in the mind of the subject who had the experience. It keeps the theory close to the experience, and invites others to report in a similar way. We know that it raises all the difficulties that occur in communicating private experiences from the consulting room, and adds to them the absence of a regulatory process, such as the transference in clinical work.

If we were to look for precedents to ground our experiment, we might call upon the engaging essay by Freud, “On Transience” (1916), which one could read as an experiential theorizing that is a pendant to the more formal “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917). Freud used the occasion of a country walk with two friends to reflect on the nature of mourning and the defenses against it. He had concepts to hand, through which he expressed the poignant sense of despair that eroded his friends' appreciation of natural beauty. He apparently used these concepts (narcissism, libido, cathexis, melancholia), more or less explicitly, to persuade or, better, to fortify his friends. He neither derived them from nor proved them through the experience on which he reported.

We will give two reports of an experience. We have concepts at hand, two in particular. They will structure the articulation of the two experiences. They are “containment,” as defined by W. R. Bion; and “depressive anxiety,” as defined by Melanie Klein.1 We will work outwards from personal experience to an understanding of the social situation of the experience, or rather, we will see them as intrinsic to each other. In