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Q: I would like to hear you speak about the realistic aspect of projective identification in relation to the mother with the baby.
Bion: The problem is how to formulate verbally what is a visual image – the mother and the baby. One of the advantages of such a visual image is that it is relatively simple and not as complicated as trying to trace the counterpart in the lives and mentalities of adults. Taking this simpler formulation, let us imagine that the baby is very upset and feels afraid of an impending disaster like dying, which it expresses by crying. That kind of language may be both comprehensible and disturbing to the mother who reacts by expressing anxiety – “I don't know what's the matter with the child!” The infant feels the mother's anxiety and impatience and is compelled to take its own anxiety back again. Contrast this with a different situation. Suppose the mother picks up the baby and comforts it, is not at all disorganized or distressed, but makes some soothing response. The distressed infant can feel that, by its screams or yells, it has expelled those feelings of impending disaster into the mother. The mother's response can be felt to detoxicate the evacuation of the infant; the sense of impending disaster is modified by the mother's reaction and can then be taken back into itself by the baby. Having got rid of a sense of impending disaster, the infant gets back something which is far more tolerable. Susan Isaacs has described a situation in which the baby could be heard saying something like “oo el, oo el”, which the mother recognized was an imitation of herself saying “well, well”. In that way the infant was able to feel comforted by a good mother inside and could make reassuring, comforting noises to itself exactly as if the mother was there all the time.