This is a paper showing how a concept central to the work of Wilfred Bion is related both to Freud's earliest formulation of how anxiety originates, and to Klein's most important technical recommendation concerning the practice of analysis with adults and small children.

In the paper I suggest that the most important function served by psychoanalytic interpretation is clarified by considering an early concept of Freud's which appears in his Project for a Scientific Psychology (1895). In his exploration of the role of the mother in alleviating and understanding the suffering of her infant, Freud wrote of the work of the specific action (die Arbeit der spezifischen Aktion). This paper clarifies that concept and brings it into conjunction with two sets of ideas relevant to psychoanalytic interpretation: The first, the point of urgency, a technical recommendation made in 1932 by Melanie Klein, discussed by James Strachey in his 1934 paper on mutative interpretations, and the second, Container-contained (♀♂), Wilfred Bion's extension of Klein's theory of projective identification. I describe how these concepts follow naturally from the early formulations of Freud's model, in order to show the affinity that these three contributions have for one another when we think of them in relation to our psychoanalytic attention and interpretation.