ABSTRACT
Wilfred Bion's recognition that to allow the patient's projection to "sojourn in my psyche" could result in some modification of the patient's "bad feelings" anticipated his imminent thoughts about the container, the contained, and the relation between the two. Bion does not speak about what may have been happening at the level of his emotional experience with the patient. Bion is contrasting instances when a patient is using projective identification primarily to evacuate, and when, by contrast, the projective identification is more communicative. He is suggesting that, at least sometimes, one can use one's countertransference to distinguish between the two. D. W. Winnicott's emphasis is on a failure "in the original maternal task", whilst Bion's is on the consequences of an innate destructiveness in the patient and the preponderance of this factor in the psychotic part of the personality. Bion's emphasis is on the patient's attack on his ability to talk to his mother "so as to avoid pain".
