ABSTRACT
The term “containment” in mental health and psychiatric taxonomy usually has a pejorative undertow summoning up ideas of incarceration, restraint, and case management. This chapter considers containment as a psychological event, and begins with a detailed case account illustrating aspects of containment during the course of working with a mother–daughter. We review how “containment” has come to be a subject of common parlance in psychoanalytic theory and practice tracing the emergence of the concept from its origins in passing references to the term in the 1950s, to its theoretical anchoring by Wilfred Bion in 1962 with his model of the “container” and the “contained”. We make a case for thinking about two types of containment; (i) endoskeletal and (ii) exoskeletal, the former referring to the inside experience of mother’s containment, the latter belonging to a more externally derived experience of paternal containment. We consider containment as a transmodal essential ingredient of the therapeutic encounter, and a useful concept for understanding the alliance between the therapist and client across all the modes of talking therapy.
