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The purpose of this paper is to show, in the light of a clinical example, how a container function disturbance in the infant's mother can lead to an excessive and continual projective identification in the child. This can be seen in typical narcissistic and borderline patients and it makes psychoanalytic treatment long-term and difficult although not impossible.
In many of his writings, Bion (1962, 1963, 1967, 1970) has developed his container-contained theory. He thinks that an infant's only means of communication is a primitive form of projective identification. By uttering sounds, by crying and by movement etc., he transfers his needs and anxieties into his mother who receives these parts of the baby and modifies them using her own intuition to understand what is the matter with the child. The mother then acts accordingly. The mother's action means that she transfers back into the infant his projected parts but now with love and understanding and thus with less distress arising. The mother has therefore temporarily functioned as the receiver and as a container of the parts of the infant which are intolerable to him, modified them and returned them to the infant in satisfying his needs. According to Bion, the analyst should act in this way in the analytic situation, the interpretations constituting the modified returned parts.
The mother's container function has still another important significance. To use Bion's expression, one can say that the mother is thinking