ABSTRACT
The fundamental intersubjective experience of emotional communication between infant and mother, and between analysand and analyst, introduced two new themes to psychoanalysis, particularly to the Kleinian analysis of the time: the importance of the container ↔ contained relationship, and the prime importance of relationships as the sine qua non and irreducible factor in the infant’s development. It is important to realize that the container is not merely the processor of the infant’s proto-emotions; it is also the generator of independent thinking in response to the infant’s β-elements. The container functions not only as a communicative translator, but also as a mediator, filter, and transducer of emotional energy states from the uncontainable domains of infinity to the containable dimensions of ordinary reality. Wilfred Bion’s container concept refers initially to a mother who bears and absorbs her infant’s emotional states, transforms them, and “interprets” them to her infant.
