The Interpreter as Maternal Container:

by Anna Blundy

Anna Blundy is the winner of the 2021 Gavin MacFadyen Prize. Her fascinating essay reviews Bion’s theory of container–contained with an unusual application to the role of interpreters and their relation to the maternal container. She touches upon the potentially catastrophic (if often humorous) results of poor interpretation and considers the similarities to the results of poor containment in the mother–infant dyad.

She looks in detail at the Reagan–Gorbachev summits in the 1980s, in Reykjavik, Washington, and Moscow. In particular, how the Soviet container-interpreters helped the US and Soviet leaders manage their way towards knowledge and, eventually, towards the end of the Cold War. She brings in Bion's 'K' and shows how ideas from Bion and other key psychoanalysts, including Winnicott and Klein, shed light on the complex task of the simultaneous interpreter.

The hypothesis is that the ‘good enough’ interpreter provides a reverie for the principal and thereby facilitates a positive re-introjection of material into both principal and interlocutor. With this, an ability to tolerate frustration is enabled to assist with the building of realistic relationships and, in ideal circumstances, to ensure relative peace.

A most enjoyable and engaging paper with an innovative application of Bion's theories, this is a must-read for all with an interest in psychoanalysis, politics, and the intricacies of translation.

19 pages, Kindle Edition

Published March 1, 2022

About the author

'I was born in 1970 and grew up on my own with my mum while dad flew around the world to wars and summits. It was odd in those days, when most people didn’t go abroad, to be watching the news (in black and white) and taking it personally. Mum had shabby boyfriends and Dad had beautiful and glamorous girlfriends. I hated both lots. I spent most holidays in New York and Washington staying in foreign correspondent flats – not much furniture but lots of bottles of spirits.

I was a show-off at school and was always form captain, always in the plays and musicals. When I was fifteen I fell in love with Communist Russia and a black marketeer I met on Red Square. It was minus twenty and we were followed by the KGB. He lives in Frankfurt now.

I went to Westminster for the sixth form and showed off some more.

My dad was killed at the end of the war in El Salvador in 1989, the beginning of my second year at Oxford. I hadn’t much liked it anyway and after that I just drank until it was over.

I had done O’Level and A’ Level Russian and I did it at university too. Afterwards I moved to Moscow and worked for an American TV company making coffee and fancying the correspondent. In the evenings I sang in a blues band.

Back in London when I was 23 I started writing for newspapers and tried to travel as much as possible. I went to Russia all the time and to America, the Middle East and Africa. I wrote a column for the Times Magazine about my love life for four years. Not so fashionable now, but it was my column and that of Zoe Heller (we started at the same time) that Helen Fielding satirised in Bridget Jones.

In 1997 I went to El Salvador and wrote a book about my dad, Every Time We Say Goodbye, about bereavement, about fathers and daughters. That same year I got married, got pregnant and got a job as Moscow correspondent for the Times. Now I’m still married (surprisingly) and have two children. I write books about Faith Zanetti and am trying to stop the roof leaking on my house in Italy.