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Freud once described himself as “a conquistador,” and this can obviously be linked with the “New World” he discovered, the world of the Unconscious, ruler of an internal reality. The concept of an internal world is not new, but it remains fundamental to psychoanalytic thought.
Equally fundamental is the concept of its relation to an external world. But, psychoanalytically speaking, in what does the external world consist? From the point of view of the internal world, it consists of what is perceived as external. This, according to Freud, is partly linked to a process of splitting off “of a part of [the] self which [is] project[ed] into the external world” (p. 136). This projected part is the one coinciding with unpleasure. Freud writes further that “at the very beginning, it seems, the external world, objects and what is hated are identical” (Freud, 1915, p. 136). So if the external world is identical with the object, the question of meeting of the two worlds is identical to the question of meeting with the object.
Bion conceived of a possible first meeting of these two worlds that he describes in terms of the mother–baby interaction. If the mother’s internal world is open and receptive enough to the baby’s projected unpleasure, distress, or hatred, she can give back to the baby as a bearable portion of the external world the unpleasure she metabolizes to empathic thought and meaning. In this way, the baby’s immature world can be gradually opened to external and internal reality, through interaction with the mother’s internal world (Bion, 1959).
This asymmetrical meeting process, the container–contained interaction (Bion 1959; Lopez-Corvo, 2003), can be the model of the specific meeting of two internal worlds – the patient’s and the analyst’s. Of course, each of them brings within him part of the internal world of his own objects. Most articles in this issue of the International Forum of Psychoanalysis fathom aspects of this meeting, in the particular space and time of