Becoming real to oneself

1. Does "holds" in the following context mean "contains"?

2. Does "the event" mean "the ritualistic participative artwork the text is talking about"?

3. Does "becoming ‘real’ to oneself" mean "Accepting the real identity of oneself instead of pretending to be another person"?

Text:

The work involved a group of people being given a spool of coloured thread which they were told to place in their mouths. They sat on the floor around one member of the group who agreed to lie down blindfolded and covered his/her entire body with the thread that fell wet from their mouths, wrapping the person in a prosthetic endoderm. They then proceeded to tear at the tangle of saliva-moistened thread to release the person from this cocoon. After the ritual, members of the group share their experience verbally. ‘The idea is that a person vomits life-experience when taking part in a proposition. This vomit is going to be swallowed by the others, who will immediately vomit their inner contents too. It is therefore an exchange of psychic qualities and the word communication is too weak to express what happens in the group.’ While this may seem in some ways far from Anzieu’s emphasis on a stabilising ego skin, the ritual is enacted to transform the participants by vomiting the poison of the phantasmatic ghosts which keeps them imprisoned in neurotic versions of selfhood, thereby healing the toxic aspects of the Self. The collective ritual itself becomes the ‘surrogate’ or quasi-object that holds the fragmentation that ensues during the creative regression of the event, almost like the environmental mother that Winnicott spoke of which allows for the destruction and re-finding of boundaries necessary to becoming ‘real’ to oneself. In these rituals, a person was allowed to hold onto something like a stone or pebble to help them in the negotiation of boundaries that might be occurring in their breach, a gesture reminiscent of the irrational but necessary attachment a child might have to a piece of cotton wool or blanket in Winnicott’s theorising of the transitional object (Art and Psychoanalysis by Maria Walsh).