Containment: The Oxygen Algorithms Can't Bottle

Remember being an infant? Not the cute, gurgling kind—the utterly helpless kind.

You’re lying on something hard (a changing table? Who knows?). An unspeakable discomfort blooms beneath you. You can’t name it, move from it, or understand it. Pure terror floods your tiny body: This is forever. This is existence itself – dreadful and inescapable.

You scream—a raw, wordless explosion of helplessness.

Then—a voice. Soft, warm, certain: “Oh, you’ve got a poopy diaper!” Hands move swiftly. The discomfort vanishes—warmth returns. You’re clean. Your parents didn’t take your cry as an attack or torture; they heard a plea for help. With good faith in your good nature, they responded informatively, confidently, and caringly.

That rescue wasn’t just practical. It was containment.

In psychoanalytic terms (Bion’s work, which I’ve been wrestling with in training, along with Heimann’s crucial On Counter-Transference), containment is this miraculous alchemy: a caregiver receives your raw, wordless terror (“I AM DYING!”), metabolizes it (“Ah, it’s just a dirty diaper – manageable”), and returns it bearable, named, and manageable (“Let’s get you clean, sweet one”). This precious experience makes existence possible. It’s how we begin to think, communicate, and develop.

Repeat this enough times, and magic happens. Instead of dissolving into primal dread at the first whiff of poop, a thought flickers: "Oh. I pooped." Then: "I need Mommy/Daddy." You learn to cry for them, crawl to them, pat their leg. Later, you use words. The once-disastrous prospect of being stuck with a poopy diaper forever vanishes. Not because poop smells nice, but because containment builds tolerance. It builds the capacity to think, to feel, and crucially, to trust that feeling.

Now, imagine the alternative. No one comes. Or they come with no words, no warmth, just mechanical efficiency (or worse, irritation). How do you make sense of anything? Trust your feelings? Tolerate distress? Without consistent containment, the world remains terrifying and incoherent. Thinking itself struggles to take root. As Bion teaches us, containment is the very bedrock of mental life.

This isn’t just baby stuff. It’s the core human condition. Reading Bion and Heimann hammered it home: Containment isn't a luxury. It’s the oxygen of human existence. It’s what lets us make sense of ourselves, think clearly, connect, create, and simply bear being alive. It’s what makes feelings knowable, thinking possible, and action effective.

Look around. See the deficit? It’s everywhere.

Take that couple in their 50s, locked in battle over toothpaste tactics. Agitation sparks blame. Hurt triggers stonewalling. Righteous anger flares. Yet the real, unspoken earthquake? Their only child leaves for college in two months. The grief, the fear of the void, the unspoken terror of "who are we now?" – it’s all uncontained. Who has the energy? And critically, who had the role models to learn this from?

Good enough parents offer containment, raising resilient, attuned kids. 

Good enough leaders consciously use containment to build aligned, effective teams. But what if you grew up where containment was scarce? Or work in a space where emotional chaos is the norm? Where do you turn?

The intuitive answer? Therapy. But not just any therapy. Therapy that is containment. As relational psychoanalysis shows us, it’s not that the therapist doesn’t feel while the patient does. It’s about the degree of feeling and, crucially, the use of those feelings. The therapist becomes the container: receiving the raw, often chaotic emotional material, metabolizing it (like a parent with the poopy diaper terror), and helping the patient make sense of it. This nuanced relational dynamic – attuned, non-reactive, truth-speaking – is a model for connection that feels increasingly vital.

And this is precisely what AI can't replicate. 

This crystallized for me back in 2020 during a candid conversation I had with my husband about COVID. The world cracked open. Systems I’d naively trusted – stable institutions, livable dignity at every level, a sense of secure civilizational progress – revealed themselves as shockingly fragile. The unsettling, liberating truth hit: Nothing is set. Everything is possible.

That realization shattered and freed me simultaneously. What emerged wasn't optimism or frantic control, but something more profound: Generative Devotion.

It’s not a buzzword. It’s a practice: A sustained, flexible, ethical commitment to becoming, in relation to others, and in relation to the unknown. It’s not optimism. It’s not control. It’s a discipline of openness, rooted in emotional honesty, ethical clarity, and creative resilience. It’s what enables love, growth, intimacy, and legacy to emerge—not from strategy, but from presence. It’s the energy the best therapists embody. The marrow of the best relationships. It’s what people might increasingly crave as AI mediates more of our lives – that resonant containment, something or someone to help metabolize the chaos, reflect meaning, and guide transformation.

Containment starts with the practice of openness

Because here’s the counterintuitive bit: In an age saturated by algorithms, extraction, and performance, the very dynamics modeled in good therapy – attuned, containing, metabolizing – might become what we yearn for most. Not just intelligence, but resonant holding.

This isn't just theory. It's survival. 

Maybe the beginning of something wiser. A more hopeful future we can build.

If the ground feels terrifyingly shaky under your feet lately—you’re not crazy. You’re human in a time of radical exposure. But maybe that groundlessness isn’t just collapse. Maybe it’s an invitation. An invitation to grow into the kind of humans who can hold – for ourselves and for each other – with a generative devotion that no algorithm can simulate. Our messy, human connection, forged in the fires of mutual containment, might just be the most radical tech of all.