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On 4 May 1966, Wilfred Bion presented to a Scientific Meeting of the British Psychoanalytical Society his paper ‘Catastrophic Change’, which had been pre-published – unlike his 1965 presentation, ‘Memory and Desire’ – in the Bulletin of that Society, for members to consider and to bring with them for discussion. As was frequently the case, his spoken version of his ideas differed considerably from the written one, to the clear irritation of some of his colleagues, one of whom had prepared lengthy arguments in advance.
His spoken talk was short and to the point – an introduction only to the ideas put forward in the paper, on the assumption that everybody present had read it; he had wanted to allow plenty of time for a full discussion.
Bion introduced his topic by speaking about a pattern he had noticed that, as he put it, kept turning up. He emphasized that he was not putting forward a new theory but was describing and exploring an observable pattern, a configuration, that keeps on cropping up, both inside and outside the consulting room. At the end of the discussion Bion reiterated that detecting the underlying pattern was only the beginning of theorizing about it and its relationships to other phenomena, and that the status of the container–contained configuration, and ideas associated with it, were provisional: a model rather than a theory.
Bion gave four descriptions of ways in which the pattern he had observed manifested and the different forms it took in different contexts and at various levels of analysis. Something contains something else, and (a) simply houses it; (b) exerts confining, damaging influence or crushing force upon it; or (c) protects and stimulates its growth. In his paper these are referred to in terms borrowed from biology: commensal
(etymologically: coexisting, sitting at the same table), parasitic, and symbiotic.
Bion observed the configuration as a constant conjunction, meaning elements which are observed to arise together reliably. The const