Containment, affirmation and structural deficiency – revisiting an issue in psychoanalytic method

ABSTRACT

The aim of Freudian analysis was to recover repressed memories, phantasies and wishes and make them conscious. This was the basic principle of analytic cure, and the means was interpretation. During the last 5–6 decades, analytic method has been supplemented by types of interventions addressing the relationship between therapist and patient. New kinds of intervention aim at adapting to the patient’s developmental level and capacity to profit from interpretations. These interventions seek to establish (new) meaning, not to uncover hidden meaning. A special point concerns a combined type, where an interpretation is wrapped in an affirmative form. The authors discuss this development and focus on the concepts of containment (Bion) and affirmation (Killingmo). They are developed from different models, but in spite of this, their aims seem to be similar; to remove doubts about the experience of reality and establish new meaning, thus preparing the way for interpretation of unconscious material. Two clinical vignettes illustrate some of the challenges facing the analyst in dealing with these dynamics.

KEYWORDS:

• Interpretation
• containment
• affirmation
• conflict and deficit pathology
• affirmative interpretation (combined form)

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Anders Zachrisson

Anders Zachrisson is training and child psychoanalyst in the Norwegian Psychoanalytic Society, and associate professor emeritus, Psychological department, University of Oslo. He was editor-in-chief of The Scandinavian Psychoanalytic Review 1993-1997, and president of the Norwegian Psychoanalytic Society 2002-2006. He has been lecturing and supervising at the School for child and adolescent psychoanalysis in the Psychoanalytic Institute for Eastern Europe and in psychotherapy and psychoanalysis training programmes in Beijing and Wuhan. He was also member, first of the Sponsoring, and then of the Liaison Committee for Moscow Psychoanalytic Society Study Group, and is author of 25 articles on psycho¬analysis. A selection of these were published in 2021 in the book Psychoanalysis my way. Complex Oedipus and other issues.

Mek Wong

Mek Wong is PhD and clinical psychologist, University of Macao, the student psychiatric clinic. She has been in the staff of the Sino Norwegian training program in psychanalytic psychotherapy for several years.