Chapter XIV. Review: Catastrophic Change and the Mechanisms of Defence

In order to bring to an end this study of the development of Bion's model of the mind, it is necessary to attempt to clarify the concept which is probably most central and least mentioned of all his ideas. Except for the paper titled ‘Catastrophic Change’ which he read to the British Psycho-analytical Society in 1966, and which incidentally, in its body never mentions the concept of the title, this phrase appears nowhere in the books. And yet all the books are about it, just as ‘Attention and Interpretation’ is certainly about attention, although it is never mentioned in the text. The paper ‘Catastrophic Change’ was a prelude to ‘Attention’ and is virtually identical to Chapter 12. In so far as its focus is upon the relationship of container and contained, in the individual and in his relationship to the group, the dread of change and the tendency for change to manifest itself as catastrophe is brought out more clearly than in the later book chapter entitled ‘Container and Contained Transformed’. Bion's model of container and contained must be juxtaposed to his idea that the truth does not require a thinker to exist, but rather that the thinker needs to find the truth as an idea which he can make grow in his mind. Among the ideas which exist in the world awaiting thinkers are certain ones which, from the religious-historical vertex, he chooses to call ‘messianic’ ideas. The relationship of container to contained in the individual, in so far as ideas institute a conflict between thought and the impulse to action, is not so observable in the ordinary course of events, but becomes dramatically manifest when an idea of messianic significance enters. In order to describe these processes of catastrophic change induced by the messianic idea Bion employs the congruent relationship of the individual mystic to his group. The group, as container, must find some means of expanding to hold this new phenomenon in order, on the one hand, not to crush or squeeze or denude the messi