ABSTRACT
It seemed to me, as I examined Bion's writings and contemporary writers on containment, that a continuum of containment emerged. I would therefore like to propose that there are degrees of containment. At one end of the spectrum, it is as if there is containment of parts of the self or personality of the other. This occurs in psychotic functioning, or when the mind is very disturbed, and one recourse seems to be to get rid of the offending part of the self: `This originated in what he felt was my [Bion's] refusal to accept parts of his personality. Consequently, he strove to force them into me with increased desperation and violence' (Bion, 1959, p. 104). In the middle of the spectrum is the containment of intense emotions, which the analyst does for the analysand and the mother does for the infant, while at the other end is the to and fro of less intense emotions, which is strongly related to mutual affect regulation and thereby links to reciprocity. Bion (1970), as quoted earlier, referred to `the ¯uctuations which make the analyst at one moment the ``container'' and the analysand the ``contained'', and at the next reverse the roles' (Bion, 1970, p. 108), and this can be seen as linking to reciprocity. It is interesting to note that the difference between these two dates indicates again a move from early Bion to late Bion.
