Attack on Link

Attack on Linking

You surely are familiar with the feeling of being completely stuck, when every attempt only makes things worse? You pull with all your strength to get out, but you hit a wall. Thoughts disintegrate and you lose power. You slowly sink into quicksand from which there is no escape.

In my therapeutic practice, I found myself in a similar situation. Frustrated and without solution, I sit and listen to a client spinning in circles. Every effort to help him ends in confusion, exhaustion, and fragmentation of thoughts and feelings for both of us.

I bring the case to supervision and while presenting, my supervisor asks: "Have you read Bion's article 'Attack on Link'?" That question was a turning point! What I was experiencing with the client - confusion, helplessness, and the feeling that thought was collapsing were not coincidental.

Bion's concept of Attack on Linking describes how the psychotic part of the personality⁽¹⁾ actively destroys the mental functions that enable thinking, feeling, and contact with reality.

To understand what this link is and why it is attacked, we must first understand what happens in psychosis.

Freud and Bion – on psychosis

Freud believed that the Ego is the agency tasked with aligning the apparatus with reality, and that the difference between neurosis and psychosis lies in the Ego's capacity to perform this function.

According to Freud, in neurosis the Ego maintains contact with reality by repressing wishes and drives, renouncing their immediate satisfaction. However, when the Ego is weak and lacks the capacity for repression, it abandons reality and actively participates in constructing a new, phantasmatic reality that corresponds to the id's demands. This leads to psychosis. Freud never fully developed a systematic theory of psychosis.

Bion believes that the Ego in psychosis does not abandon reality, as this is essentially impossible. He shifts the focus from abandonment to a systematic attack on the links between consciousness and the functions that enable perception, thinking, reasoning, and emotional understanding of reality.

When reality becomes unbearable, the psychotic part of the personality uses omnipotent phantasy⁽²⁾ to destroy these links. This protects the psyche from collapse, but the price paid is bizarreness in thinking (hallucinations), loss of connection between thoughts and feelings, relationship disturbances (others become threatening, persecutory objects...)

To understand this more clearly, we must first clarify what these links are.

What is a Link (Connection)

For good mental health a person needs to understand and integrate experiences, process emotions and thoughts, and connect them into a meaningful, organized system. And for this to be possible, mental links must exist.

Bion defines links as connections that connect senses with consciousness, as well as functions within the apparatus itself - perception with thinking, emotions with meaning, the internal world with reality.

A link is a living mental function that enables internal experience to be translated into something thinkable, symbolized, and bearable. Without links, experiences remain raw and unprocessable.

Imagine links as bridges in a person's mind. These bridges serve:

• to transform feeling into thought
• to connect experience with reality
• to connect internal state with external event
• to connect one thought with another

If the bridge is firm: experience can be crossed, understood, integrated, and endured
If the bridge collapses: experience remains on one side, overwhelming, unbearable.

What happens when mind destroy these links?

Attack on linking is the active effort of the psychotic mind to destroy the links that enable connection of thoughts, feelings, and experiences - so that reality becomes distorted or fragmented. The attack prevents experience from being translated into thought, feeling into meaning, and reality into something that can be processed.

Bion's clinical example illustrates attack:

He describes a psychotic patient who at certain moments babbled or stammered, like a baby babbling while trying to express itself. The client had no neurological or organic problems. He spoke fluently about neutral topics, but when he needed to establish a relationship between himself and the analyst, he would repeat syllables, babble, and stammer.

During one session, the patient was trying to describe how he felt. Whenever he approached a thought that would be understandable to the analyst, his speech would break down. Bion noticed that speech disintegrated at moments when verbalizing the thought would connect him with an internal feeling, and with the analyst as an external object.

This was not a symptom, but an attack on the function that links thought-speech-relationship. In other words, the patient could express himself, but was not allowed to establish a link between: internal experiences and thoughts - their symbolic expression - another person who could receive and understand that thought.

Attacks do not manifest only in verbal form. They can be visual, olfactory, auditory. The consequences are destruction of thought and language, concrete thinking, and concretization (inability to symbolize and conversion of psychic contents into physical reality).

Genesis of the Attack

Bion was an adherent of Object Relations Theory⁽⁴⁾. He starts from the assumption that the child is in a symbiotic relationship with the mother from birth. This relationship is primarily affective, phantasmatic, and bodily.

Communication of the infant's internal states with the mother occurs through projective identification. Since the infant does not have developed capacity for verbal expression, it communicates its internal states to the mother through PI - hunger, distress, need for closeness.

The mother, if well-attuned to the child's needs, takes in the unprocessed emotional states, contains them, and returns them to the child in a bearable form. This enables the infant to gradually develop the capacity to cope with affects and helps it understand that these affects are not destructive.

Imagine an infant overwhelmed with discomfort - hungry, frightened, or tense. It cannot think or name this state. Instead, it puts this state into the mother through crying, gaze, restlessness, so that mother can process it for her. The mother feels it, recognizes the type of tension and responds promptly - picks up the child, soothes it, feeds it. What was unbearable is returned to the child in a form it can bear. Along with this process, the infant has internalized the good breast, a mother capable of withstanding and processing affects.

Now imagine a different scenario, when the mother cannot receive these affects because she is too anxious or absent. What the infant projects is not retained and processed, but rejected or returned in a more chaotic state.

The infant is then forced to evacuate these states. Affects must not be experienced internally because awareness of internal conflict carries the risk of annihilation. The infant then internalizes the "bad breast" - a mother who cannot contain or who returns anxiety even more chaotically. This internalized object becomes an internal destructive force that will henceforth attack all links. Hatred toward emotions that cannot be processed grows into hatred toward all links that enable experience: between thoughts and feelings, self and others, perception and reality.

But Bion emphasizes that the source can also lie in the infant's innate envy and aggression. The infant hates the mother's capacity for peace, stability, capacity for thought. This envy triggers an attack not only on external links (with the mother), but also on internal links between thoughts and feelings, perception and meaning.

In adulthood, the person projects parts of their internal world into other people - not to be understood, but to evacuate unbearable contents and destroy the links that enable any understanding. Links between perceptions, thoughts, and feelings are sabotaged, and the world becomes hostile, fragmented, bizarre.

Therapeutic Stance

When a client attacks links - confusion, emptiness, loss of ability to think clearly are not signs that the therapist doesn't understand the client. These are projections of the client's internal world.

The client projects chaos, fragmentation, attacks on thoughts, and the therapist receives this into themselves. At that moment, the biggest mistake would be rushing to interpretation or attempting to resolve the confusion. Because above all, the client is not seeking a solution, they are seeking someone who can stay with them in the chaos without falling apart.

The therapist must endure the confusion - to hold the client's projections within themselves without the need to immediately explain, resolve, or return them. This is containing: the ability to remain present in a state where thinking does not function, without panic or defense.

Over time, the client begins to feel that these states can be endured, that chaos does not have to lead to collapse. The therapist who remains there despite the attack shows the client that links can exist, and that they can slowly be restored.

Pdf download: Bion - Attack on link

Text wrote: Nemanja Kurlagić – O.L.I. psychotherapist