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W.R. BION anticipated our current interest in intersubjectivity, and his object relations theory is specific about key relational phenomena. The cornerstone of his theory of individual and group development is that thinking is a primary emotional need and matures in the context of social communication. He formulated the essential process of how thinking and communicating mutually develop in terms of a model of “container-contained.” The model draws attention to how we hear and think about another's communication, how we convey our experience back, and how this communicative interplay impacts the participants and the immediate future of the relationship.
Bion began formulating these ideas in his work with groups. He discovered that a type of countertransference emerged from taking in the members' projective identifications. Although often painful to absorb and make sense of, the analyst's subjective reactions could be utilized to learn about the group and its members. Bion demonstrated how the clinician, using primary process—the capacity to free-associate, imagine, and dream—and secondary processes, might gather in and decipher the patients' unformulated or unarticulated experience. The analyst's successful subjective transformations, “containing,” of the shared experience, the “contained,” provided the most reliable basis of interpretations.
As he developed his metapsychology, Bion described processes of symbol formation, human development, internal and external object relations, and learning from (and resisting) emotional experience, all illuminated by the notion of container-contained. Additionally, he briefly elaborated three variations: commensal, symbiotic, and parasitic interactions (Bion, 1970, p. 95 see also Billow & Lovett, 1984; Langs, 1978; Symington & Symington, 1996, pp. 56-57).