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Questions

Questions 1: Discuss Bion's model as it relates to both psychological development and psychotherapeutic process.

The baby/mother interaction leads by processes of projective and introjective identification to the creation of an inner world in the baby, based on its experience of being “contained” by the mother. The Bion (1967) concept of container and contained are crucial at this stage of development.

Bion likens the process of “containment” to the early interactions of a baby and mother. The baby experiences a state of distress or ill-being while not being clear what the problem is - merely the fact that there is a problem. The mother recognizes that the baby has a problem without being clear what it is - she does, however, by and large have a greater capacity to embark on the process of dealing with the problem and working towards a joint resolution of the difficulty. In this model the mother is the container, the distress the contained. This model, in my view, has a key application in understanding organizations. Other versions of the above model might be a container that does not have the capacity to contain, and even one that acts as an “echo-chamber” aggravating the problem.

As we shall see, Bion's model retains a basic conception in which the infant communicates with the mother by projecting, even forcing, emotional experience into her through projective identification i.e. infant projection is followed by maternal identification with what is projected. It is as though in this model the mother discovers what the baby feels by finding herself feeling in a particular way (cf. the way the analyst finds himself feeling some surprising affect and then 'realises' it 'belongs' to the patient). Winnicott's model, by contrast, sees the infant as communicating through emotional signs . The infant's affect is displayed in such a way that the attuned mother naturally 'reads' it. To be sure the infant may not 'intend' the mother to 'read' its emotion, yet probably the display is programmed in a way that anticipates such maternal response. In the first case it is as though the mother is not attending to the signs and the baby has to redouble its efforts to make her notice. In the second case, the mother is right there, searching for the signs, in a state that Winnicott called 'primary maternal preoccupation'. In the first case it as though the mother does not realise that her baby can communicate; in the second, she is constantly scanning the situation for communicative signs.

This raises the interesting possibility that when the infant (or patient) seems to force emotional experience into the mother (analyst), this is already a response to the mother's (analyst's) failure to 'read' the signs. If this were so, projection of something into the mother would not, as Bion argued, be the primary means through which the infant gained access to the mother's attention and “reverie” - the fundamental form of infant-mother communication the Kleinian school asserts - but a consequence of breakdown in more basic modes ...