For years I kept buying lottery tickets, not always literal ones, but tickets to ideals: training, projects, goals. Each promised a version of adoration and recognition. Only recently, after a long analysis, have I realised that underneath these ideals was a defence against the most primitive of losses.
By primitive loss, I mean the kind of loss that happens before memory. The infant’s experience of absence when there is no breast to cry into, no mind to receive distress and make it bearable. It is not the loss of a person, but of being held, thought about, andcontained. We might define this as our first experience of primitive loss.
In a good enough scenario, the baby’s first experiences of absence are received and thought about by a caregiver. The baby learns that frustration can be survived and transformed. The mother’s mind turns raw feeling into something that can be held and reintrojected. Out of that exchange grows the first seed of thought, an internal container that allows mourning and imagination to develop.
But when absence is not met with thought, when cries meet a wall rather than a mind, the psyche learns a different lesson. Absence becomes annihilation. Instead of being digested, early fear and hunger are flung back undigested. The ability to contain never quite forms, and later the adult must find other ways to manage the same primitive terror: clinging, rage, grievance, or the chase for ideals.
These same defences do not only shape inner life; they spill into the collective. I have begun noticing how we cling to ideals in society: flags in windows, slogans, lifestyle creeds, careers, or the dream of winning the lottery. It is easy to dismiss these as pride, politics, or religion, but underneath there may be something more human and universal, a way of defending and steadying the self against primitive loss.
Bion described this as the loss of the breast to cry into, the failure of early containment. When distress meets no receptive mind, it cannot be transformed into thought. There is no secure object to lose, only an absence to survive, and this unthinkable loss becomes the prototype for all later omnipotent defences.
These omnipotent solutions help the self to keep from falling apart. Some defend upwards through ideals, perfection, or helping. Others defend downwards through illness, grievance, or retreat. Both are ways of managing the same primitive loss. You could picture it as a Spectrum of Adaptation to Primitive Loss:
- Negative Pole (destruction or collapse): illness, addiction, grievance, control, impotence
- Positive Pole (creation or striving): perfectionism, helping, ideals, flag waving, omnipotence
Both poles are powered by omnipotence, the fantasy of total control.
- The positive omnipotence says, “I can replace what was lost. I will perfect myself, strive, heal, teach, or save others. I will become the ideal object.”
- The negative omnipotence says, “I can destroy the need altogether. I will numb, attack, or withdraw so I do not have to feel the loss.”
Both defend against mourning by trying to control what cannot be controlled, one through creation, the other through destruction. Bion might say both are evacuations of frustration rather than transformations of it. One evacuates upward into ideals, the other downward into despair.
Here we can see what Melanie Klein called the paranoid–schizoid position playing out at both ends of the spectrum. Whether the movement is manic striving or depressive collapse, the psyche is split, clinging to the good while fearing the bad, denying loss through opposite extremes. The mind cannot yet hold contradiction.
The middle ground of the spectrum is the depressive position, where the opposites begin to meet. It is the place of ordinary being, the relinquishment of omnipotence. Here the psyche discovers it can neither replace the breast nor destroy the need for it, only live with its absence and find meaning there. This is the soil of mourning, where creativity and love can coexist with loss.
At times we move between these positions, often without realising what has set the movement in motion. An encounter that stirs old, unprocessed feeling, such as walking into a room of strangers, being looked at, or feeling left out. All of these situations can release a surge of raw affect. When that flood meets a container that is tired, thin, or already under strain, the mind tips toward one pole or the other. Some of us move upward into control, effort, or pleasing; others drop downward into retreat, silence, or resentment. The oscillation itself is not failure but a signal that the affect has exceeded containment. The work is to notice what stirs the swing, strengthen the inner vessel, and return more readily to the middle ground where both the feeling and the self can be held together.
When analysis goes well, this early story begins to change. What could not be mourned can finally be held and thought about. The mind learns, as the infant once hoped to learn, that absence does not mean annihilation. In Bion’s terms, the analyst lends their alpha function until the patient can bear the gap alone, learning to contain what once had to be expelled. Over time, the no thing that once felt like death becomes a space of thought, imagination, and choice.
Over years of my own analysis, I began to see that containment itself develops. What starts as an external function, one mind holding another, can evolve into an inner structure. I think of this as the Inner Crucible. This image could only have come from someone raised in the Black Country, where furnaces once turned raw ore into something strong and useful.
Bion described emotional growth through the dynamic of container and contained: one mind receiving, digesting, and transforming what another cannot yet bear. At the beginning of analysis this is a relational process, two psyches joined in a struggle to make meaning out of raw affect. The analyst’s mind becomes a temporary container, holding the patient’s projected fear, rage, or longing until it can be reintrojected in a more thinkable form.
Yet the aim of analysis is not to remain dependent on another’s mind. Over time something internal begins to take shape, a psychic structure that can perform this function from within.
The container holds, but the crucible transforms. A container offers safety; a crucible bears heat. It is forged through countless encounters with frustration and absence, those moments when the psyche stays with its own raw material instead of evacuating it. What was once projected into another mind can now be held, heated, and metabolised internally. The heat that once threatened to destroy becomes the very agent of integration.
The Inner Crucible marks a developmental shift from dependence on external containment to an internal capacity for transformation. It represents the point where thinking and being merge, where affect can be endured long enough to yield symbol, thought, and choice.
This movement mirrors the trajectory of the analytic process itself: first the analyst contains, then the patient co-contains, and finally the psyche becomes its own crucible, able to face the no thing of absence without collapse. In that sense, the Inner Crucible extends Bion’s theory. It describes the moment when container and contained no longer require two minds but coexist within one.
That is the quiet goal of analysis: to become one’s own container, to hold the heat of absence without cracking or fleeing, until what once felt like nothing begins to take form, until being and agency quietly take their place.
Finally, the hope is that this understanding reaches beyond the analytic room. It invites a more compassionate reading of human behaviour, our own and others’. Ideals, grievances, addictions, and extremes are not just moral failings but defences against unthinkable loss. When we see the frightened infant beneath the adult armour, hate begins to soften. What remains is recognition: that all of us, in our different ways, are trying to survive the same early absence, some from one end of the spectrum, some from the other, all yearning for the middle ground where loss can finally be lived and thought about.
Seeking Asylum Within