Bion's 1959 paper 'Attacks on Linking' stands as one of the most consequential theoretical contributions in post-Kleinian depth psychology. The concept designates the psyche's destructive assault upon any mental function, object, or relationship that serves to connect one thing with another — pre-eminently the breast as prototype of all linking, the parental couple as creative dyad, the analyst's interpretive function, and emotion itself as the medium of contact between self and world. Bion situates these attacks within the psychotic part of the personality, tracing their origin to primary aggression and envy operating against the mother's capacity for reverie, and to the infant's projective identification of intolerable affect into an object that proves unreceptive. The consequence is devastating: surviving psychic links become perverse, sterile, or pseudo-logical rather than emotionally meaningful. Later in 'Learning from Experience' (1962), Bion integrates the concept with his alpha-function model, showing that attacks on linking are structurally related to attacks on alpha-function and on the projective identification of consciousness itself. Kalsched receives the concept within a Jungian-archetypal frame, connecting Bion's linking attacks to the self-care system's auto-immune assault on the personal spirit following trauma. Together these readings reveal the concept's enduring generativity: it names the intrapsychic mechanism by which psychic growth is not merely inhibited but actively destroyed.
the destructive attacks which the patient makes on anything which is felt to have the function of linking one object with another... the prototype for all the links of which I wish to speak is the primitive breast or penis
Bion introduces the foundational thesis: attacks on linking target any mental function connecting objects, with the primitive breast as the archetypal prototype of all such links.
, Attacks on Linking, 1959thesis
These attacks on the linking function of emotion lead to an over-prominence in the psychotic part of the personality of links which appear to be logical, almost mathematical, but never emotionally reasonable. Consequently the links surviving are perverse, cruel, and sterile.
Bion articulates the clinical outcome of attacks on linking: emotion as connector is destroyed, leaving only pseudo-logical, affectless, and sterile psychic bonds.
, Attacks on Linking, 1959thesis
the inborn characteristics and the part that they play in producing attacks by the infant on all that links him to the breast, namely, primary aggression and envy... the psychotic infant is overwhelmed with hatred and envy of the mother's ability to retain a comfortable state of mind
Bion identifies primary aggression and envy as the inborn drivers of attacks on linking, intensified when the mother cannot adequately contain the infant's projected states.
, Attacks on Linking, 1959thesis
The link had been regarded with hate and transformed into a hostile and destructive sexuality rendering the patient-analyst couple sterile... a capacity for understanding is the link which
Bion demonstrates clinically how any creative link between patient and analyst — including understanding itself — becomes the target of hateful destruction, rendering the therapeutic couple sterile.
, Attacks on Linking, 1959thesis
the pleasant feeling of being understood had been instantly destroyed and ejected... he felt I was able to do so
Bion's clinical vignette illustrates how the experience of being understood — a moment of linking — is immediately annihilated through violent psychic ejection.
, Attacks on Linking, 1959supporting
Problems, the solution of which depends upon an awareness of causation, cannot therefore be stated, let alone solved... there is never any question why the patient or the analyst is there
Bion shows that attacks on linking destroy the capacity for causal reasoning, splitting off 'why' through guilt and leaving only a static, functionless awareness.
, Attacks on Linking, 1959supporting
related to attacks on linking, 21, 22... Attacks on linking, related to projective identification of conscious, 21
Bion's index in 'Learning from Experience' formally maps attacks on linking to alpha-function failure and to the projective identification of consciousness, integrating the 1959 concept into his broader epistemological theory.
, Learning from Experience, 1962supporting
the material poured out could be seen as the link between patient and analyst and I could interpret in the way described in Attacks on Linking. Interpretations had some success, but I d
Bion reflects that transference material itself constitutes the link between patient and analyst, and that interpretive technique must engage this link directly, though with limited success alone.
, Learning from Experience, 1962supporting
attacks against linking 23, 36–7... Bion, W. 23, 36, 102; attacks against linking 123–4
Kalsched's index confirms the centrality of Bion's attacks on linking within his Jungian-archetypal theory of trauma defenses, mapping it to the self-care system's destructive operations.
, The Inner World of Trauma: Archetypal Defences of the Personal Spirit, 1996supporting
In order to escape being destroyed by its own death instinct, the child ejects its hatred outward onto the (bad) breast or penis (projective identification) where it can then 'locate' its otherwise unbearable anxiety as persecutory fears of attack
Kalsched contextualises Bion's linking attacks within Klein's death-instinct framework, showing how projective identification onto the breast mediates the destructive dynamic.
, The Inner World of Trauma: Archetypal Defences of the Personal Spirit, 1996supporting
parts of the personality were mistaken as not-self elements and attacked, leading to self-destruction in a kind of auto-immune disease (AIDS) of the psyche
Kalsched draws on Stein's archetypal defense model to illuminate how attacks on linking can manifest as the Self's auto-immune assault on its own parts — a structural analogue to Bion's intra-psychic destructiveness.
, The Inner World of Trauma: Archetypal Defences of the Personal Spirit, 1996supporting
This is not regression, as we like to think of it in the service of the ego, but 'malignant regression' – regression which suspends a part of her in an auto-hypnotic twilight state
Kalsched's concept of malignant regression parallels the logic of attacks on linking insofar as it describes a defensive operation that severs the ego from growth-promoting relational experience.
, The Inner World of Trauma: Archetypal Defences of the Personal Spirit, 1996aside