Chapter 2 Naming and Containing

Life reposed with my daughter Order,

the one within me, the other without me.

I rose over them, but their arms were around me.

This chapter is about Wilfred Bion’s concept of the container and the contained. He derived this notion initially from his clinical work, particularly with borderline and psychotic patients, and applied it in a very general way to individual and group behaviour. I want to approach my discussion of his concept through its clinical manifestations in analysis, and I will begin with a description of a patient who resembles those who provoked the idea in Bion’s mind.

Miss A, as I shall call my patient, was compelled by threats from within herself to empty her mind of the thoughts she was having. She did this by repeatedly flushing them down the lavatory. There were days when she did this so often that she broke the mechanism. By the time she would tell me about this in her session she no longer knew what these thoughts were. The process, however, of emptying out was so severe that she felt empty of any ideas and any mental life; she complained of feeling ‘unreal’. The quality the outside world acquired in this process was a sense of menace. As a consequence of this mental evacuation of ‘something bad’, she found it impossible to travel outside an imaginary boundary, which roughly coincided with the outskirts of London, where she lived. Thus she was menaced from within by an inner presence or from without by unspecified dangers. If she took things in and held them in her mind she was in danger; if she expelled them from her mind she produced a menacing outside world. She could neither introject nor project without producing a fearful situation.

Her dilemma was epitomised in a memory she often repeated to me of an

episode that occurred during the Second World War, which served as a condensation of experience which functioned as an expression of earlier unconscious memories and a prototype for later experiences. In this memory of