ABSTRACT
Bruni introduces us to an aspect of Bion's thinking that has been relatively underappreciated: his concept of the negative or inverted container/contained. According to Bion, in healthy development the mother, through her reverie, functions as a container for her infant's projections of painful, unrepresented experience (the contained), and uses her alpha function to transform the projected contained into an emotional thought (Bion, 1962), which she can represent to the infant. This interactive process soothes the infant and, as it is introjected, enables the infant to develop an apparatus for thinking thoughts and to become a thinking entity with a mind of its own (Caper, 2000). Through such interactions, the infant gradually comes to possess an independent capacity for thinking that owes its origin to successful experiences with a mother who is capable of tolerating and transforming her baby's raw emotional feelings.
