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Suzanne Maiello begins with Bion's provocative question: ‘Does a fetus think?’ (Bion 1962 cited in Maiello 2012, p. 250). She queries, ‘is it too daring to think that the germ of the highest levels of mental abstraction may lie in the earliest psycho-physical developmental states of the human being?’ (p. 252). In the context of Bion's container/contained model, Maiello hypothesizes that prenatal sensations of physical containment, particularly auditory, tactile, and kinesthetic sensory experience, ‘may have their mental counterpart in the development of a proto-mental container and memory, the existence of which can be observed in the newborn infant’ (p. 250). Maiello shares theory, infant observation, and case material, creating links toward a deeper understanding of how prenatal experience might dwell in the human psyche.
Maiello reviews Bion's model of container/contained, emphasizing its dynamic qualities and susceptibility to emotion. Her writing adheres to Bion's phenomenological sense that the aim of hypothesizing is to invite new contemplation, a sense resonant with Jung's description of hypothesis as symbolic, ‘an anticipatory description of something still essentially unknown’ (Jung 1971, para. 817). She invites us to wonder if ‘uterine containment is not only a physical reality’, but a reality ‘connected to primal prenatal proto-mental experiences’ (p. 252).
Maiello describes the conjunction of two elements at conception through their evolution into the unborn child's sense of contained separateness, which allows for ‘thinking’. She reminds us that thinking usually requires a tolerance for separateness and that this situation gives rise to projective identification, for example when a newborn, or perhaps even a fetus, communicates anxiety that the mother contains and responds to, thus transforming unbearable experience into something manageable. Survival and development for the unborn child depend on the physical ‘containing capacity of the mother's uterus