Containment as a lived experience

The paper aims to bring alive the concept of containment by engaging with the lived clinical experience of this process. There are innumerable secondary accounts of the container-contained dynamic, but few that really convey what the emotional experience of providing containment is like. Theoretical accounts tend to replicate rather than elucidate Bion’s own excessively abstract formulations. As a practice, the idea of containment is surrounded with a halo of approval, which distracts attention from the rigours, demands and emotional complexities of its successful provision, which is a psychologically active and continuous relational process. Clinical and applied illustrations are mostly derived from the author’s experience as a psychoanalytic family therapist, but also indicate the very wide applicability and value of the practice of containment in human service and everyday life contexts. The first part of the paper is devoted to offering an accessible account of the meaning of the concept, and the remainder to a range of practice examples that illustrate different facets of this fundamental but subtle and nuanced clinical capacity. Each of the case studies in this paper has been fully anonymised

Lived experience · Psychotherapist · Sociology · Computer Science · Earth Systems and Cosmic Evolution · Environmental Philosophy and Ethics · Psychology · Sustainability and Climate Change Governance