ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with a brief exploration of the psychodynamic meaning of containment, which, though complex, has been opened up by some useful commentaries. It shows that how a sophisticated concept developed in a specialist setting can be, and has been, adapted to a generalist one, where a range of different philosophical, theoretical, and clinical models necessarily co-exist. As a concept related to practice technique, it is usually familiar to therapists and others trained psychodynamically. Although general practitioners (GPs) train differently, they have their own historical links with psychoanalytic thinking, some of which might be unfamiliar to psychodynamic therapists. GPs, psychological therapists, nurses, and complementary therapists, for example, engage with the most private aspects of either the bodies or the minds of their patients and sometimes both. The nature of the GP–patient consultation was looked at in depth, drawing on a psychoanalytic perspective, by Michael Smith and Enid Balint.
