Attacks on Linking

Attacks on linking is Wilfred Bion’s term for mental activity that damages the connections through which emotion, perception, memory, and relationship become thinkable. The concept describes more than a failure to understand: it concerns an active or defensive destruction of the capacity to connect one experience with another. It is important in psychoanalysis because it gives clinicians a way to understand states in which meaning itself is felt as threatening.

Definition and scope

In Bion’s theory, a link is a living connection between elements of experience. A link may join a feeling to an idea, a cause to an effect, a person to another person, or a communication to the mind capable of receiving it. Linking is therefore necessary for learning from experience. It allows scattered impressions to acquire sequence, emotional significance, and symbolic form.

An attack on linking disrupts this connective work. The attack may appear as abrupt confusion, evacuation of thought, fragmentation, contempt for understanding, or an inability to tolerate the emotional implications of an interpretation. Although Bion developed the idea while studying psychotic processes, he did not restrict it to psychosis. Less severe attacks on thought can occur in many forms of mental life, especially when knowing would expose dependence, loss, envy, guilt, or vulnerability.

The term should not be reduced to ordinary forgetfulness, disagreement, or limited intelligence. It refers to a psychodynamic process in which a potentially meaningful connection becomes a target because the connection carries an unbearable emotional consequence. What is opposed is not simply a particular conclusion but the function that makes conclusions, relationships, and learning possible.

Historical formation

Bion introduced the formulation in his 1959 paper “Attacks on Linking,” written within the post-Kleinian tradition. His account extended Melanie Klein’s descriptions of projective identification and destructive envy. Klein had shown how unwanted parts of the self may be phantasmatically placed into an object. Bion explored how such processes affect the bond between minds and the apparatus for thinking itself.

The concept also developed from Bion’s clinical work with severely disturbed patients. He observed communications that seemed designed both to convey an experience and to destroy the analyst’s capacity to receive, connect, or interpret it. The analyst might feel made confused, emptied, or incapable of thought. For Bion, these reactions could provide evidence about a patient’s internal situation when they were contained and reflected upon rather than enacted.

Attacks on linking became part of a broader theory that includes alpha function, beta elements, and the container-contained relationship. Alpha function names the transformation of raw emotional and sensory impressions into elements that can be dreamed and thought. When this transformation is impaired or attacked, experience may remain unprocessed and be expelled rather than represented. Linking and containment are thus related but not interchangeable: containment makes transformation possible, while linking organizes transformed elements into meaningful relations.

The links of love, hate, and knowledge

Bion described three fundamental kinds of emotional link: love, hate, and knowledge, often represented as L, H, and K. The knowledge link does not mean the possession of information alone. It concerns the emotional relationship between a subject who seeks to know and an object that can be known. Its negative form, commonly written as minus K, indicates a relation organized around misunderstanding, denigration of truth, or destruction of the means of knowing.

An attack can be directed at any of these links. Love may become intolerable because it reveals dependence. Hate may be disowned because it threatens the image of a good self or object. Knowledge may be attacked because understanding brings painful reality into view. These processes often overlap. A person who cannot bear dependence may attack the capacity to recognize another person’s value, then experience the damaged relationship as proof that no trustworthy bond exists.

Bion connected this destructiveness with envy, particularly envy of an object experienced as possessing understanding, creativity, or emotional resources. The aim is not merely to obtain what the object has. It may be to spoil the valued capacity so that the difference between self and object no longer has to be endured. In this sense, the attack can damage both an external relationship and the internal functions derived from that relationship.

Clinical manifestations

In analytic treatment, attacks on linking may be inferred from patterns rather than from a single symptom. A patient may repeatedly dissolve connections established moments earlier, strip words of shared meaning, or transform an interpretation into something concrete and hostile. Emotional sequences may be broken so that consequences seem unrelated to actions. Curiosity may suddenly give way to blankness, mockery, certainty, or pressure for immediate discharge.

The concept is also relevant to the analytic relationship. A potentially useful connection between patient and analyst may itself provoke an attack because being understood creates dependence or exposes a need for the other. The resulting disturbance can be expressed through transference, silence, enactment, or communications that induce confusion in the analyst. Careful attention to countertransference may help distinguish an induced loss of thinking from the analyst’s own assumptions or errors.

The clinical response is not to force coherence prematurely. An interpretation offered before emotional experience can be contained may be felt as another intrusion and intensify the attack. The analyst instead attempts to preserve the possibility of thought: noticing fragmentation, tolerating uncertainty, restoring links gradually, and naming the fear or destructiveness associated with knowing. This work depends on the analytic frame, which provides continuity when inner connections are unstable.

Interpretive value and limits

Attacks on linking offers a precise account of how thought can be undermined by emotional conflict. It is particularly valuable when a clinical impasse cannot be explained only by repression or by the absence of information. The concept highlights that the ability to think is relationally developed and may be defended against when thought entails painful dependence or recognition.

Its use also requires restraint. Confusion can arise from trauma, neurological conditions, language differences, medication, fatigue, social danger, or an analyst’s unclear intervention. Not every rupture of understanding is an unconscious attack. The formulation should therefore remain a hypothesis grounded in repeated clinical patterns and the immediate context of the analytic encounter. Used dogmatically, it can protect the analyst from recognizing a mistaken interpretation by attributing every disagreement to the patient’s destructiveness.

Later psychoanalytic writers have expanded the idea beyond psychotic functioning to problems of symbolization, learning, group life, and institutional thinking. Across these applications, its central claim remains consistent: psychic survival depends not only on having experiences but on preserving the links that allow experiences to become emotionally meaningful and available for thought.

References

Bion, Wilfred R. “Attacks on Linking.” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, vol. 40, 1959, pp. 308-315; reprinted in Second Thoughts.
Bion, Wilfred R. Learning from Experience. Heinemann, 1962.
Klein, Melanie. Envy and Gratitude and Other Works 1946-1963. Hogarth Press, 1975.
Hinshelwood, R. D. A Dictionary of Kleinian Thought. Free Association Books, 1989.

Official link: PEP-Web archive record for “Attacks on Linking”