ABSTRACT
Wilfred Bion developed the idea of a containing function on the basis of his clinical experience and by extending Melanie Klein’s theory of projective identification, which Bion felt illuminated a wider range of phenomena than those foreseen by Klein. Bion took Sigmund Freud’s insight further when he recognised that the mother exercises her helping power not solely, or even at times primarily, through her material provisions, but by offering another function, one foreshadowed by Freud in his early writings but not articulated by him. Bion may have read the paper, given his interest in Jung’s ideas in the mid-1930s, and been struck by Jung’s phrase, so similar to the one he was to develop, the ‘contained’ and the ‘container’. Bion took the containing aspect of Klein’s ideas further, developing it as a central line of his thinking by regarding it as a mental function.
