Bion thought Freud had overestimated the importance of the sexuality, and that this came about because the very situation of psychoanalysis (analyst and patient) stimulates the basic assumption of pairing (BaP), in which sexuality is in a central position. Bion, himself, does not talk much about sexuality. At the same time what he does say is often unexpected and illuminating, and I will include the detail of this. Also, when Bion says that other factors as well as sexuality are implied in the concept of container/contained, we have tended to concentrate - with him - on the other factors (K and -K), and not on the implications of this concept for our understanding of sexuality. I will explore some of the implications, and suggest that Bion's seminal concept of container/contained offers a potentially complimentary contribution to Freud's understanding of sexuality.

In the second half of the paper I discuss Bion's use of the concept of the pleasure principle, and the possibility that the concept has become pathologised in some contemporary psychoanalytic thinking; where pleasure principle functioning is presented as necessarily the same as the evasion of reality, rather than a normal mode of functioning in its own right.