You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned.
W.B. Yeats, “The Second Coming” (1919)
This poem came from the experience of the chaos of the First World War. It was this traumatic experience that taught Bion, the young tank commander, barely out of adolescence, the importance of containment and the basis for his future theory of thinking (Souter 2009).
Projective identification makes it possible for (the infant/patient) to investigate his own feelings in a personality powerful enough to contain them.
Denial of the use of this mechanism, either by the refusal of the mother to serve as a repository for the infant’s feelings, or by the hatred and envy of the patient who cannot allow the mother to exercise this function, leads to a destruction of the link between infant and breast and consequently to a severe disorder of the impulse to be curious, on which all learning depends … the conduct of emotional life … becomes intolerable. Feelings of hatred are thereupon directed against all emotions … and against external reality which stimulates them. (Bion 1959, 106)