ABSTRACT
The most important characteristic is its hatred of any new development in the personality as if the new development were a rival to be destroyed. The emergence therefore of any tendency to search for the truth, to establish contact with reality and in short to be scientific in no matter how rudimentary a fashion is met by destructive attacks on the tendency and the reassertion of the “moral” superiority. Perhaps without realizing it, Bion seems to have reconfigured the role of this primitive “super”ego, not merely as the pathological agent that pre-empts the formation of the ego with its harsh, hypocritical moral system, but also as a pathologically “protective” agent for the now demoralized infant who is denied a reasonable container-mother into whom to project. The relationship between the container and the contained is generally pictured unilaterally—that is, the infant or the analysand/patient as the contained and the mother or analyst as the container.
