Where does container collide?

In psychoanalysis the container is one half of the container-contained pair that Wilfred Bion set out in his 1962 book Learning from Experience: the mind of a caregiver or analyst takes in a person's raw, unbearable emotional experience, holds and transforms it, and returns it in a form the person can think about and tolerate. Bion drew on the picture of a mother who receives an infant's distress and gives it back as something manageable, and later writers carried the model into therapy and group work. Here the container is a psychological function that processes feeling, not a steel box that carries freight, a bounded region in a word's meaning, or an isolated software runtime.[1]

Unit

One mind or relationship acting as the holder that receives and transforms another's emotional experience

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Assessed qualitatively through clinical observation of how distress is taken in, held, and handed back in a usable form

In cognitive linguistics the container is a basic image schema, a recurring pattern of bodily experience with an inside, an outside, and a boundary, that structures how people reason and speak. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson introduced containment as a core metaphor in their 1980 book Metaphors We Live By, and Johnson worked out the CONTAINER schema in detail in his 1987 book The Body in the Mind, showing how expressions like being in love or out of trouble map spatial containment onto abstract thought. Here the container is a mental pattern that organizes meaning, not a therapeutic function, a shipping box, or a piece of systems software.[2][3]

Unit

One inside-outside-boundary pattern recruited to structure a concept or an expression

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Studied through linguistic analysis of spatial expressions and through experiments on how containment shapes reasoning

In computing a container is an isolated user-space environment that packages an application with its dependencies and runs on a shared operating-system kernel, without a full virtual machine. Soltesz and colleagues formalized container-based operating-system virtualization in their 2007 paper at the ACM EuroSys conference, presenting it as a lightweight alternative to hypervisors, and Dirk Merkel's 2014 Linux Journal article on Docker described the tooling that made containers a mainstream way to build and ship software. Here the container is a bounded software runtime on a host kernel, not an emotional holding function, a pattern in language, or a steel box on a ship.[4][5]

Unit

One isolated process environment sharing a host kernel, packaging an application and its dependencies

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Characterized by resource limits, startup time, and density per host, and compared against virtual machines in systems benchmarks