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Zinkin explores aspects of the grail legends in order to illuminate ideas about analysis. The article itself possesses some of the qualities of the grail stories, questing and mysterious. Reading it, one has the experience of a sort of rapt rummaging, rather as though the author, like the grail knight, were at times simply allowing his horse to take him where it willed. A similar response is stimulated in the reader.
The author's central preoccupations concern the nature of the container and the contained, the relationship between them, and their importance in analysis. The investigation is not an easy one for, as Zinkin observes: ‘One starts with a few simple steps, then it starts to get a little difficult, and finally one loses one's way’, and enters a world where the setting and what is set in it ‘seem to change places’.
He notes the shift in emphasis and interest away from ‘analytic activity’, traditionally defined as towards the setting in which analysis takes place, and marks the importance of Winnicott's ideas of maternal holding in effecting the shift. Bion's discussions of the container and the contained—owing their own debt to Jung—are also introduced, along with the paradoxes involved in attempting to understand the relationship between the two.
The main threads which Zinkin follows in the grail legends are related to containers and containment, to questing and questioning, and to the mysteries with which the stories are imbued. In some versions the grail is a chalice or container; in others it is a stone, and so a ‘containable’ rather than a container. The article deals only with the containing aspects of the grail, and sees it as a feminine symbol, able to nourish, to store, and to be penetrated. It resides, along with the wounded Fisher King, in a castle—which is thus also a container—surrounded by a waste land in which the people suffer and await deliverance, obtainable only when a knight finds the castle, enters it and asks the right question. The ritua