The child as container

THE CHILD AS CONTAINER

In the psychologist's profession there is a unique process we call containment. One person expresses emotions that overflow their capacity, while another receives them, becoming a kind of container for feelings the first person cannot manage. But what if this is not merely a professional function? What if it is also a story rooted in childhood, shaping how we come to perceive the world?

❇️ EMOTIONS AS BALLAST AND AS GIFT ❇️

Most of us know what it is like to try to be good for Others—especially in relationships, whether intimate or parent-child. We receive the emotions of someone important to us, trying not to react, not to show fatigue, to “keep ourselves together.” At first it seems fine: we support, console, absorb another person's feelings like a sponge, and it can feel like the only right way. But what happens next?

When containment continues for a long time, the container fills up. We can no longer simply “absorb” another person's emotions if we have no space of our own in which to release them. Emotions that accumulate without an outlet can, on the one hand, enlarge our own container and our capacity to hold the emotions of others; on the other, they can lead to periods of intense discharge. When the accumulated affect is negative, this partly resembles those same 🔗shadow moods🔗.

❇️ CONTAINMENT AS A PROFESSIONAL PROCESS ❇️

The same mechanism operates not only in personal relationships but in psychotherapy. The therapist begins to “contain” the patient's emotions. This becomes especially visible when working with people experiencing chronic stress, aggression, or unstable relationships.

Here is one example:

One of our colleagues, an experienced therapist, felt completely paralyzed in the presence of a borderline patient whose daily life was being destroyed by chronic sadomasochistic relationships with men, episodes of physical aggression, instability at work, and bulimia. During sessions, the patient sprawled in the chair and angrily complained about everything happening in her life, moving from one topic to another in a monotonous voice without even looking at the therapist. The therapist felt drained by the endless sequence of complaints and intuitively became angry at the patient's bleak, passive, implicitly superior, and arrogant behavior during sessions.

The patient described her mother as grandiose, selfish, arrogant, and dismissive, and implied in her complaints that as long as the therapist did nothing to change the patient's daily suffering, she was behaving exactly like the patient's mother. Only the therapist's internal examination of her stable and intense countertransference led her to realize that the patient was treating the therapist the way her own mother had treated her. This allowed the therapist to analyze the dominant transference situation. In this way, the therapist transformed the patient's endless stream of complaints.

But what brings a person into the profession of psychotherapy in the first place? People often wonder: how can someone listen to other people's problems day after day? There is even the crude analogy of a prostitute, or of a person onto whom everyone unloads all their problems, after which they feel cleansed and leave. Could it be that the psychotherapist is simply the person with the largest container in the building? Could the capacity for containment correlate with the strength of the Shadow—the impulses of the Id—and could this combination, in turn, be related to difficult conditions in which the child grew up, including pre-Oedipal trauma?

Could someone from an early age begin to discover that they can be the one who holds, supports, and yet maintains distance? Do psychologists first go through an unconscious process of “containing” the emotions of people around them before they recognize what role they are taking on? Is it significant that at a certain point in life we encounter a state of emotional overstrain? As Nancy McWilliams wrote:

I do not want to give the impression that schizoid people are cold and indifferent. They may care deeply about others while also needing to preserve protected personal space. Some are drawn to psychotherapy, where they can safely put their exceptional sensitivity at the service of others. Allen Wheelis (1956), who probably experienced himself as schizoid, wrote an expressive essay about the attractions and dangers of an analytic career, noting how people with an internal conflict around closeness and distance may be drawn to psychoanalysis. As an analyst, a person comes to know others more intimately than almost anyone else ever has, while their own self-disclosure remains within predictable professional boundaries.

💬 AN INVITATION TO REFLECT 💬

What do you think: do people enter psychotherapy precisely because they have this kind of experience of containment? What draws a person to the profession? Is the Shadow connected with the capacity to contain? We will talk about the Shadow in the next article.

#Containment #Transference #Countertransference

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Sources

1. Yeomans F. et al. Transference-Focused Psychotherapy for Borderline Personality Disorder: A Clinical Guide. Russian edition, Moscow, 2018. 498 p.

2. McWilliams N. Psychoanalytic Diagnosis: Understanding Personality Structure in the Clinical Process. Russian edition, Moscow: Klass, 2015. 592 p.

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