Concept
Attacks on linking
Destructive attacks, in phantasy, by the psychotic part of the personality on whatever is felt to link two objects: the breast and the infant, the patient and the analyst, and in the end one thought and another. Driven by hatred and envy and carried out through projective identification, they leave the mind unable to make connections and so unable to think.
Development
1959
introduced by Wilfred Bion
In Attacks on Linking (1959)
Relations
- 1959 gave rise to Ego-destructive superego
The ego-destructive superego is the internal precipitate of the failed link between infant and mother. It forms where the normal communication by projective identification is missing, and from inside it goes on attacking links of emotion and reason.
- 1959 derives from Splitting
Bion works within Klein's account of the paranoid-schizoid position. The attack on links carries her splitting further: what is split, emptied and destroyed is not only the object but the connection between two objects, and in the end between one thought and another.
- 1959 derives from Envy
Writing two years after Klein's Envy and Gratitude, Bion traces attacks on linking in part to an inborn excess of hate and envy. It is envy of the understanding breast, and of any creative coupling such as the parents' intercourse or the analytic pair at work, that drives the patient to spoil the link.
- derives from Projective identification
Works
- 1959
"Attacks on Linking" is a paper by Wilfred Bion, published in the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis in 1959 and reprinted in his collection Second Thoughts (1967). Drawing on the analyses of psychotic and severely borderline patients, it describes the destructive attacks that the psychotic part of the personality makes, in phantasy, on anything it feels to be a link between two objects. Bion takes as his prototype the infant's phantasied attacks on the breast as the link between itself and the mother, and extends the idea to the parental couple in intercourse, to the verbal communication between patient and analyst, and to the patient's own capacities for thought, emotion and perception. The paper proceeds through a series of clinical episodes. In one, a patient's stammer is understood as breaking up his words so that they cannot carry meaning between him and the analyst. In others, the patient's handling of the analyst's interpretations, and of the analytic pair working together, shows how any creative coupling, above all that of the parents, is felt as something to be split, emptied and destroyed out of envy and hatred. Because emotions themselves link one object to another, they too are attacked: the patient comes to hate emotion, reality and the mental apparatus that apprehends them. Bion places these attacks within Melanie Klein's paranoid-schizoid position and her account of splitting and projective identification, but adds a distinction of his own. Projective identification is not only a means of evacuating unwanted parts of the self. In its normal form it is the infant's earliest way of communicating, putting feelings it cannot bear, such as the fear that it is dying, into the mother, so that they can be modified there and taken back in a form it can tolerate. When the mother, and later the analyst, will not receive these projections, the infant resorts to projective identification with ever greater force and frequency, and its development deteriorates. Bion therefore traces attacks on linking to two sources together: an inborn disposition to destructiveness, hatred and envy, and an object that denies the patient the normal use of projective identification. The outcome is a primitive superego that forbids projective identification, and an internal object that intensifies the emotions it was needed to modify. The links that survive are logical, even mathematical, but never emotionally reasonable: they are perverse, cruel and sterile. The paper's account of a mind that cannot take in and transform experience prepares Bion's later theory of thinking and of container and contained.
- 2005
See also
Linked from
People
References
- Attacks on Linking1959Evidence for a relation
- Linking, Attacks on2005Evidence for a relation