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Duncan Cartwright has written a deeply thoughtful book that succeeds in mapping some of the most interesting terrain in current-day clinical psychoanalysis, breaking significant new ground along the way. Down to earth and readable, the book tackles difficult ideas in a language that does not mystify, with many helpful clinical vignettes. Avowedly a clinical rather than a theoretical book, in fact it encompasses a wide range of phenomena, from pragmatic clinical theory to a sophisticated conceptual investigation. An adroit theoretical navigator, Cartwright is able to weave together strands of contemporary thought in ways that refresh and aid new thinking in psychoanalysis. In particular, his formulations on proto-containment (precursor to containment proper) and beta-mentality (where thing-like thinking has taken the place of affective thinking-in-relation to people) strike me as being on the leading edge of our clinical concerns.
Containment is a clinical and metapsychological concept intrinsically connected to the experience of “encountering unbearable states of mind,” which is the title of the book's first chapter. This “encounter” is not an exceptional occurrence, however, but is woven into the fabric of what we are doing at every moment in the clinical situation; and “containment” comes in many forms, operating simultaneously on different levels of mental functioning. If we think that transference-countertransference, for example, is constantly at work in analysis, so, too, is the container function.
From its inception half a century ago, the container-contained model was recognized by students of Bion's writings as a major new theoretical idea, with the power to illuminate a wide range of psychical phenomena as manifested in individual psychology, the clinical encounter, group dynamics, and socio-cultural belief systems. Gradually the term “containment” has