Secure States
Hannah Zeavin
In 1947, diplomat George F. Kennan formulated the strategy by which the United States would attempt to fight communism and control its spread. The plan was simple. It merely required the “adroit and vigilant application of counter-force at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points, corresponding to the shifts and maneuvers of Soviet policy.” This was the so-called “X Article.” While others proposed turning the U.S. away from the world and practice “isolationism” or all-out “rollback” in the name of “liberation” (i.e., the hot wars, and they would come), the X Article offered a different approach. Kennan thought foreign policy should be an admixture of targeted geographical blockage, economic spending, and psychological warfare. Eventually, the X Article would come to be better known by Kennan’s phrase: the “containment policy.” Kennan’s containment policy always had the mind in mind. It might be summarized by one of its taglines: “Stop communism, it’s everybody’s job.” It was the job of the military, along with its industrial complex, to do containment over there in Europe, but there was also containment work to be done at home. Like all other homework, this was to be mother’s responsibility.
In the postwar era, mothering in the U.S. and the UK turned away from a scientific model, which required highly regimented oversight from doctors and scheduled care, toward a more libidinal or instinctive ideal, as inaugurated by Dr. Spock’s 1946 imperative: “Trust yourself.” Those instincts—and that form of unstudied yet practiced care—were understood to surround, control, shape, and impart messages to the child. Mother was thus charged with undoing the scourge of “delinquency,” which Karl Menninger warned would become an epidemic within a generation if not stopped. Delinquency was a catchall term: it denoted theft as much as communism, queerness as much as autism, fascism as much as promiscuity. The problem of mothers was first redescribed in experiments on individual children, including those who could be studied without their mothers—a crucial context of wartime psychology—but it was soon understood to play out on the national stage. As historians Elaine Tyler May and Fred Turner have shown, mothers were figured as essential to the protection of democracy at home, and the family was configured as an antifascist democratic technology. When the family, with the mother at its center, mediated the social, mothers were also understood to produce its degradation.
These demands for “domestic containment,” as May puts it, met a particularly nasty strain of anti-momism, accompanied by the publication of dozens of popular books that argued that American mothers were a scourge, providing either too much or too little stimulus for their babies and, in turn, producing “undesirable” outcomes in them: queer children, autistic children, trans children, submissive children, and, of course, communist children—or sometimes all these kinds of children at once. Many psychiatrists agreed almost every American mother was bad at producing good children. Now, the nation depended on her securing its own borders from within, and the fate of its normative anti-communist sons hung in the balance (daughters were important only insofar as they, too, would mother, trained in the home as such). Domestic containment required mother to get it together, at scale. Mother should neither freeze her child—a perceived distance roundly condemned by the household epithet “refrigerator mother”—nor overheat her child with her smothering hyper-attention. She had to cut the umbilical cord, so to speak, to instill a deep individual independence in her child.
As many scholars have argued, Bad Mother theories were deployed in the service of safeguarding democracy and shoring up future democratic subjects via the psychical health of their mothers and the resulting relationships with their children. This research took the local findings of the psy-ences to the scale of the nation, both in the U.S. and in England. As Deborah Weinstein writes: “Because the family was seen as a key site for the production of healthy personalities and productive citizens, child-rearing patterns held the potential to bolster or undermine American politics and society by affecting the psychological well-being of children . . . bad parenting became the cause of fascism, prejudice, autism, and homosexuality.” These social ills were considered the uncontained, and symptoms of uncontainment. When they appeared in children, there was one solution: to contain them by law, force, and institution where mother had failed in her love.
The marked expansion of schizophrenia as a Black diagnosis, amid the rise of mass incarceration, is often a story told separately from the concurrent research on democratic and authoritarian families. But the family and the prison, as separately contained laboratories, were both studied in this moment, and often by the same psychologists. Accordingly, the paradigm of domestic containment had an additional resonance in the United States, where the people who needed to be captured, who were a priori pathologized as ill, were (and remain) predominantly Black—hot affects, the uncontained of Black rage. During the Cold War era, the psy-ences attached Blackness to psychotic and schizophrenic presentations. White psychologists were containing Blackness through diagnoses while demanding Black subjects self-contain. Again, mothers were to blame, and this narrative was signally disseminated with the 1965 publication of the Moynihan Report. The injunctions to “be contained”—as in to self-contain, and if that fails, to “be contained,” as in held by the state—are an obvious form of policing, intervening in and on Blackness. To show uncontainment as freedom, by rewriting this negative containment, Fred Moten and Stephano Harney have argued, “they containerize her, but she is uncontained.” For Toni Morrison, to be uncontained is to be uncontainable, “outlawed, unpolicing.”
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Mother as a technology and site for containment had already been established by 1962 when Bion debuted his understanding of the dyad of container and contained. W. R. Bion published Learning from Experience the same year of the Cuban Missile Crisis, as world events had gone from cool to hot. Domestic containment, in both senses, had been entrenched for more than a decade, but while Bion offers his theory in 1962, he had long been thinking about it, even if it was greeted as new in psychoanalysis in the 1960s.
“These social ills were considered the uncontained, and symptoms of uncontainment. When they appeared in children, there was one solution: to contain them by law, force, and institution where mother had failed in her love.”
Bion had begun to think about what might be contained, what might not be contained, and what might need to be contained, produced on the grounds of a patient described in “Attacks on Linking,” widely thought to be prefatory text for the container/containment theory to come. There, Bion focuses on one patient, likely Samuel Beckett, whom Bion treated for less than two years from 1934 to 1935. Despite the short duration of the treatment, and the fact of its ending some fifteen years before the patient discussed in “Attacks” was first presented, Beckett apparently got deeply under Bion’s skin. In “Attacks,” Bion suggests that patients might not only use projective identification—displacing what they find disturbing in themselves onto another—but that the analyst might take it up, metabolize it, and give it back to the patient.[1] Bion was certain something happened there, in the exchange where both patient and analyst rid themselves of that which ails them by putting it into the other. Bion writes, “[the patient] split off his fears and put them into me, the idea apparently being that if they were allowed to repose there long enough they would undergo modification by my psyche and could then be safely reintrojected.”
In reworking projective identification, Bion extended the work of his teacher, Melanie Klein. Klein had it that the baby’s process of projective identification involved putting that which was ill “into the mother”; it wasn’t enough for the baby to purge itself of what felt bad—this badness needed a secure destination. But Klein was not Bion’s only influence, nor was he merely “learning from experience,” as he might say. In Learning from Experience, Bion redescribes the work of the mother as a containing function. The container’s counterpart is the contained. Of course, the mother herself is not a container—but it is her function. Through this, she offers the process of containment to her baby. She orders, makes sense of, and takes up the baby’s contents, taking what is violent and intolerable and making it tolerable. She fails to contain when the intolerable reappears.
Here, Bion expands the scope of container/contained. It was already there in the clinic in 1934—in the Beckett-Bion dyad—and had always already been found in the mother-infant pairing. It was in groups dynamics too. There are three types of containment. One might be called good, or “symbiotic,” in which a relationship continues to change and grow, whether between analyst and analysand, mother and child, or institution and constituent. The second type, “commensal” containment, is static, neutral, fine; Bion can’t be bothered much with it. The third type, “parasitic,” is disastrous—it “destroys both parties to the association,” and finally “destroys host and parasite alike.” For Bion, when it becomes devastating, the inability to contain is itself a form of containment— a wretched, extractive, envious swallowing of the other. Like all envy, its aim is destruction. This is the basic contour of containment as a theory. “Attacks on Linking” was published in 1959, but its related material was presented in 1950, and its proper elaboration appeared thirteen years later, in the eighth chapter of Learning. Across this period, containment became an evermore loud term—both for what good anti-communist mothers might do and for what nations did when they felt threatened. Thus, Bion’s containment theory made its debut long after the word had already developed a loud, unavoidable resonance with foreign policy.
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Why did Bion choose the word containment for his great contribution to intrapsychic processing? When we place it alongside its antecedents in both foreign and domestic policy, what does it show us about the theory? Having served in World War I as a soldier and in World War II as a military psychiatrist, Bion was intimately familiar with French defensive strategies aimed at isolating both Germany and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, where the liminal states in Eastern Europe were called on to act as buffers, containing the USSR. The U.S. containment policy during the Cold War was merely a resumption of a French policy after that brief interruption known as World War II. The “diseased,” conceptually contagious nations were kept at bay behind a human and geopolitical wall known as le cordon sanitaire. The shift from sanitation to containment in international parlance was already well-established as Bion was beginning to work on his theory. Bion’s maternal containment, a theory of the mother making good sense, appears just as that mother of the West—both literally and metaphorically—tried to contain the unruly threat of communism, processing it, giving it form and shape as a bearable ill. He called it containment, possibly unconsciously, because the phenomenon he described—which he could scale—worked this same way. And when we contain patients, or our children, or fail to do so, it is this struggle we reinvoke. Bion’s own work on containment as a theory thus bears the signatures of world historical time, clinical time, and biographical time: from the anticommunist scene and its science unfolding in Europe in the 1930s, when Beckett first helped him see the way projective identification might meld with countertransference; to 1945, when Bion became a father and witnessed infancy in real time; to 1947, when India, where Bion was born, was partitioned (split off from and contained). Taken together, these eras and events render containment an overdetermined choice for the name of his new concept.
“Bion’s containment theory made its debut long after the word had already developed a loud, unavoidable reso nance with foreign policy.”
Foreign policy has triply shaped psychoanalysis. First: Freud, in defending his new science, used what he called his own “foreign policy” to decide what did or did not count as psychoanalysis (and who might be a psychoanalyst). Second: in the annexation, separation, and immigration policies that determined how psychoanalysis was restricted, why its practitioners fled, and where they landed. Third: psychoanalysts, after Freud, have made their own theoretical and practical foreign policies, shaped by those applied to them, and have domesticated those policies in the consulting room.
During and after the war, child psychiatry and psychoanalysis debuted on the world stage. It makes sense, then, that the world stage found its way back into the theory. The majority of leading European psychoanalysts— especially those offering major revisions (even conservative ones) to the theory of mother-child relations—were women and, indeed, often mothers (in Anna Freud’s case, a de facto stepmother). These theorists often disagreed with one another, sometimes brutally, but their theories and their focus carried weight: from Anna Freud’s notion of acting “in the best interest of the child,” which was used to restrict paternal custody rights after divorce in the UK for a generation, to Melanie Klein’s descriptions of the mother-baby that gave rise to the theory of reparation.
But it’s not just that language and metaphor travel back and forth between the geopolitical and the psychoanalytic, it’s that both are focused on the ideal production of the subject within the maternal matrix, and with the aberrations and discontents (the uncontained) of that containment. They represent two fronts of the same project.
Historians and theorists of psychoanalysis such as Michal Shapira, Denise Riley, and David Eng have all demonstrated how the maternalism of psychoanalysis after the postwar era was immediately imbricated with the state. Conceptions of domestic security (in the sense of the private sphere) didn’t merely rhyme with projects of domestic security (in the sense of a nation). In this case, correlation is causation. Object relations, attachment theory, and ego psychology were all entrained by foreign policy. Their capacious set of metaphors—including holding, separation, security, and attachment—took foreign policy past the home front and into the home. To this list, we add Bion’s X article, containment.
[1] It has been suggested that the seed for this paper might have come as early as 1935, when Bion and Beckett went together—an analytic dyad on a date—to hear Jung lecture at the Tavistock.