Translating Psychoanalytic Terms Into Everyday Life: Containment

When we talk about “containment” in the psychoanalytic sense, we are talking about the parent’s ability to contain the infant’s anxiety, anger, and other strong feelings.

And this is one of the most important things we as parents can do.

Wilfred Bion, a brilliant British psychoanalyst, talked about how important it is for the mother (or father) to stay relatively calm when the baby is upset. He said that this is the way that the baby eventually learns how to tolerate his or her own upset.

He explained that it is crucial for parents not to be overwhelmed when their babies and toddlers become anxious or feel overwhelmed. Babies with parents who can take the panic out of their anxieties eventually internalize their parent's capacity to tolerate and manage anxiety.

The baby achieves a sense of psychological stability by having parents who are able to tolerate her feelings—whatever they may be. If the baby can communicate her anxiety to her parent, and if the parent can draw on his or her own inner resources, including his or her own experience of having been mothered, and to receive these feelings calmly, the baby benefits. If the parent can manage his or her infant’s fears and impulses, and if she or he can communicate this back to the baby through his or her tone of voice, way of holding the baby, and the look in his or her eyes, then the baby will experience relief.

The baby feels that her parent can manage the things that she cannot. And gradually, after many experiences like this, the baby can learn to tolerate her own primitive states of mind and difficult feelings.

The baby learns that all feelings, no matter how intense, can be survived. And they do not need to be acted on. They can be experienced and they can be metabolized.

If a parent can tolerate the strong feelings that their baby or toddler has—and this can be very hard at times—they show the baby or toddler that these feelings are just feelings and they can be lived through.

A parent who can soothe an infant who is distressed, and who can be with a toddler even during a tantrum without melting down themselves, proves to the baby and toddler that feelings are not toxic.

Of course, parents, there will be days when you are less able to do this than others. On these days, there might just be one too many tantrums and then you may have had it. This happens.

But containment is about what you are able to do most of the time.

The ability to tolerate and contain your baby or toddler’s discomfort, anger, or fear is an important part of being a parent—and one worth keeping in mind.