How do we balance these forces that seem so at odds, especially when it always appears to be such an unfair fight? The needs of the Beast seem to trump the needs of the Baby every time, given that the Baby’s true worth is often unknown or in doubt and can remain so for months on end. How do we hold off the Beast, curbing its appetites, without putting our companies in jeopardy? Because every company needs its Beast. The Beast’s hunger translates into deadlines and urgency. That’s a good thing, as long as the Beast is kept in its place. And that’s the tough part.

The Beast thrives not only within animation or movie companies, of course. No creative business is immune, from technology to publishing to manufacturing. But all Beasts have one thing in common. Frequently, the people in charge of the Beast are the most organized people in the company - people wired to make things happen on track and on budget, as their bosses expect them to do. When those people and their interests become too powerful - when there is not sufficient push-back to protect new ideas - things go wrong. The Beast takes over.

The breast upon which the infant is so utterly dependent must be destroyed because of that dependence. The spoiling act is similar to that of a child who, being desirous of another child’s toy, breaks it to ward off its own feelings of helplessness. In the developing mind of the infant, sadistic attacks on the breast increase until it is entirely without value: in the words of Klein, “it has become bad by being bitten up and poisoned by urine and faeces”. The stronger and more enduring the envy, the more difficult it becomes for the infant to reclaim the lost object, to make good through reparations.

If the therapist cultivates a life of serenity and neutrality, she stands a chance against the wild beasts that are let loose in a psyche that has not yet found its fenced pasture. In medieval Europe stories were told of the unicorn, a beautiful animal that could cause widespread damage and yet was the very symbol of health. The image of the unicorn at its most useful showed him in a small pasture surrounded by a wooden fence. The psyche needs some containment, a fence or a vessel, to keep its wildness contained.

The wiring for change is built in, but some sort of benevolent attention has to activate it. Winnicott called this the “facilitating environment” and linked it to a mother’s natural, and “good-enough,” devotion. He believed that aggression is intrinsic to a baby’s psyche, that it shows up as an aspect of an infant’s inherent self-centeredness, and that a good-enough parent coaxes a child—over time— from total demandingness into a recognition of the parent as a person in their own right.