Attacks on Linking Revisited

A New Look at Bion's Classic Work

Catalina Bronstein, Edna O'Shaughnessy, Catalina Bronstein, Edna O'Shaughnessy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429911088
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This book aims at providing further contributions inspired by Bion's paper Attacks on Linking (1959) by a distinguinshed group of scholars who have focused on different aspects of his propositions.Contributors: Christine Anzieu-Premmereur, Rachel B. Blass, Ronald Britton, Catalina Bronstein, Elias Mallet da Rocha Barros, Elizabeth Lima da Rocha Barros, Antonino Ferro, Jay Greenberg, Monica Horovitz, Clara Nemas, Edna O'Shaughnessy, Rudi Vermote

"Attacks on Linking" Revisited

Chapter One
Disconnection: a new look at narcissism

Ronald Britton

Bion’s development of his concept of “attacks on linking” was part of his exploration of the “psychotic personality” and the part it played in psychotic and non-psychotic neurotic disorders (Bion, 1967a[1957], 1967b[1959]) He considered that a “psychotic personality” co-existed with a “non-psychotic personality” in psychotic disorders and in severe neuroses, with the psychotic personality dominant in the former and masked by a more dominant neurotic pathological organisation in the latter. He also suggested that in the psychotic personality, projective identification substituted for regression in the neurotic personality. The projective identification he refers to in this passage is of an extreme order in which the ego’s experience of reality is fragmented and projected, sometimes into inanimate objects. Thus, the elements provided by Freud’s reality principle, “that is to say, consciousness of sense impressions, attention, memory, judgment, thought” (Bion, 1967b[1959], p. 47) are lost through projection.

At the heart of this “psychotic personality” was “an omnipotent phantasy that is intended to destroy either reality or the awareness of it, and thus to achieve a state that is neither life nor death” (Bion, 1967b[1959], p. 46). In other words, that if the mental representation of something could be eliminated, this would eliminate the actual “something”. In this supposed state of affairs, the eradication of awareness of an object by elimination of its psychic representation would mean that the actual link, the sensory connection to an object, would be wiped out. An example from the history of psychoanalysis, the case of Anna O as described by Breuer, can illustrate it. She had negative hallucinations: that is, in one phase of her disorder, she was completely perceptually unaware of the physical presence of anyone other than Breuer (Freud, 1895d). This was part of a severe case of what was rightly described as hysteria; the use of a psychotic mechanism in this neurosis is complementary to Bion’s theory and perhaps illustrates the usefulness of the “old-fashioned” psychiatric term, hysterical psychosis. Anna O omnipotently created a subjective, perceptual world that included only herself and her doctor.

In the cases Bion wished to characterise as manifesting features of the “psychotic personality”, the connections with anything outside the “self” were completely eliminated. Within my own psychiatric experience, the clinical picture most resembling this was in some cases of catatonic schizophrenia in the days before antipsychotic medication became commonplace. In this state, which could be regarded as resembling a theoretical state of primary narcissism, there is imputably only a central self with no relationships other than to itself. But if one posits, as Melanie Klein did, that an object relation exists from the outset of any self-awareness, this self–self relationship is originally a self–object relationship. In “attacks on linking” the omnipotent phantasy has changed subject–object into subject–subject: fusion instead of connection. We could describe this in terms of projective identification.

If we take the first object relationship to be container–contained, that is, self inside something or something inside self, once this has been replaced by self–self, it is then a self contained by itself or a self containing itself. If, as I believe, we experience the mind/self as in the body or the body as in the mind/self, an alternation that is the normal experience of body–mind relations, then, by phantasied disconnection, the mind is only inside itself and the body is only an idea of the mind. The outside world is only an extension of the self; there is no outer world or, indeed, any other world.

I have never had the opportunity of analysing a schizophrenic patient in a catatonia, which one can think of as the ultimate disconnected state of mind. The psychotic patients one does meet clinically in analysis are more partial in this respect and one relies on contact with the non-psychotic personality of the patient, which, as Bion said, is always a latent or hidden presence in psychotic illnesses. My own experience with a chronic psychotic patient, in an analysis that lasted twenty years, is that this is so. In her case, her mind was dominated by thoughts from her psychotic personality and, in effect, they terrorised her non-psychotic self. Her quasi-neurotic solution was to produce a pathological organisation that aimed to rid herself of all her thoughts since she took all thought as arising from her psychotic personality. Her methods were to attempt to eradicate her thoughts by physical symbolic evacuations such as flushing the toilet repeatedly, closing doors behind herself innumerable times in the hope of leaving her mind in the room she had just left, and so on. This was a defensive use of projective identification that, alas, created an even more dangerous external world for her that was full of her evacuated thoughts. She managed to place this world outside the small portion of London she and I both inhabited, which meant she could live within it but not travel anywhere beyond it. She was undiagnosable, according to psychiatrists who, taking her symptomatology to be obsessive–compulsive, tried to locate her as such but were unable to accommodate her multiple delusions within the diagnosis. Once in analysis, the chronic psychosis was evident and the defensive rituals could be seen for what they were.

However, our lack of access to the ideas of the manifest psychotic personality, such as that described by Bion, can be compensated by considering the works of artists committed to a similar system as an ideology. One such was William Blake in the early eighteenth century, and another was Kazmir Malevich in the twentieth century. The latter wrote of his new movement,

Suprematism is the beginning of a new culture. Our world of art has become new, non-objective, and pure. Everything has disappeared; a mass of material is left from which a new form will be built . . . The artist can be a creator only when the forms in his picture have nothing in common with nature. (Malevich, 1915)

The iconic picture of this movement was his Black Square (1915), which eliminated all forms in the picture that the visiting eye expected to see.

Similarly, Blake wrote, “I must invent a system or be enslaved to another man’s”. He regarded his imagination as the divine source, the creator, and he regarded belief as the act of creation; self-doubt he saw as destruction.

If the Sun and Moon should Doubt
They’d immediately Go out.

(Keynes, 1959, p. 433)

He saw belief as truth; formed by imagination and not received by perception; not seeing is believing but believing is seeing. He wrote that, “. . . vision is the world of imagination: is Eternity. Vision is all that exists”, and he claimed, “Mental things alone are real”. The eye is an organ for projection not perception:

This Life’s dim Windows of the Soul
Distorts the Heavens from Pole to Pole
And leads you to Believe a Lie
When you see with, not thro’ the Eye

(Keynes, 1959, p. 753)

Belief, treated as fact, was, for him, the limiting membrane of an otherwise bottomless void, the only curb on the total mental disintegration that followed the act of creation. Creation, he thought, resulted in the catastrophic separating out of the intellect from within the primal unity of the self. The intellect he saw as attached to the illusion of a finite, measurable, physical world. He had two versions of this catastrophe. In the first, Urizen (a pun on your reason), who is the personification of intellect, creates a fathomless void in the personality by detaching himself from the whole body of the eternal self by his attachment to the world of physical sensation. In the second account of catastrophic creation, Los, imagination personified, is confronted with an impenetrable, material, objective world created by Urizen, a solid non-fluctuant object. Los was driven wild with impatience by this black, adamantine, impenetrable, reality rock created by Urizen. So he smashed it to pieces, thus producing a bottomless abyss into which he then fell.

So, we have in the first version the subjective account of a prenatal quiescent psychic unity ruptured by a part of mental life that, by linking itself to the physical senses, tears itself off, leaving a chasm within the self. In the second account, the infant imagination, in its frustration and antipathy to reality represented as an impenetrable, black, cold object of adamantine hardness, smashes it to fragments and then falls into the abyss thus created.

. . . Los fell & fell
Sunk precipitant, heavy, down, down,
Times on times, night on night, day on day.
Truth has bounds error none; falling, falling;
Years on Years, ages on ages,
Still he fell thro’ the void, still a void

(Keynes, 1959, p. 258)

This second version of Blake’s strongly resembles that described by Melanie Klein as the destructive attack on the internal object resulting in states of mental fragmentation. “The mechanism of one part of the ego annihilating other parts . . . I suggest underlies world catastrophe”, she wrote (Klein, 1946, p. 24). Bion, in several of his writings, emphasised this notion of Klein that the patient attacks his object with such violence that not only is the object felt to disintegrate, but also the mental apparatus of the person delivering the attack. This poetic account by Blake describes this and the ensuing symptomatology in an extraordinarily vivid way.

The mind then falls into the abyss of unknowingness thus created. As it falls, it labours to produce a belief system that it can treat as the truth, the “bounds” it needs to arrest its fall. Earlier, Blake had propounded a dictum of absolutist subjectivity so that “Everything possible to be believed is an image of truth” (Keynes, 1959, p. 151); so, the belief system the mind creates “as an image of the truth” serves as its own safety net and remedy for chaos and the void. The enemies of this belief are, therefore, the enemies of self-existence and the creators of chaos. The sceptics, the Questioners, as Blake calls them, are, therefore, the enemies of the mind. Professional questioners such as empirical or natural philosophers are the agents of Satan: Bacon, Locke, and Newton in particular: Bacon for seeking truth through reason as opposed to revelation; Locke for his emphasis on learning through experience as opposed to Blake’s belief that “Man is a garden ready planted and sown” (Johnson & Grant, 1979, p. 443); Newton for formulating the laws of nature in a material universe that Blake abhorred and proof by mathematics which he despised. “Science is the Tree of Death”, wrote Blake (Keynes, 1959, p. 777). The only safety net and remedy for world catastrophe is psychotic delusion.

We, as analysts, would do well to bear in mind the way Blake sees the realistic or reasoning doubters as the dangerous agents of chaos. Analysis, with its inbuilt scepticism, can be seen to be dangerous to patients with such beliefs and they will try to avoid analysis even while in it. They might well be attached to the analyst in a positive transference while treating analysis as potentially catastrophic.

Blake, interestingly, offers us alternative reasons for disconnection from the internal representation of the psychical world and these one could see similarly as psychoanalytic alternatives. In one, the primal unity, we might call it “primary narcissism”, is ruptured by an attachment in the first object relationship. There is now a gap in the inner world. In other words, an object relationship divides the self. In the second, the primacy of the infinitely, immediately satisfying pleasure principle is challenged by the adamantine nature of reality with its finite space and measurable time. This arouses such fury that its internal connections are smashed. Frustration, or, rather, intolerance of frustration, is the provocation and destruction is its outcome. Is the individual’s disconnection from the outside world and its internal representatives regression or destruction? Freud appeared to think of regression while Abraham saw it as intolerance of object love and implied aggression. This difference of opinion persists in psychoanalytic theorising, resurfacing in different views of narcissistic disorders as defensive and libidinal or destructive.

This difference, I think, disappears if, instead of thinking of narcissism as primary and object love as secondary, they could be seen as coincident and conflicting from the beginning. But I would propose that they are not both positive drives or impulses, that it is not narcissism vs. socialism, as Bion puts it. Narcissism can be seen not as a force in its own right, but as a negative reaction to connection to objects because they are not identical and, thus, arouse a psychic immune response of hostility. It could be said to be not auto-erotism but autoimmunity. It applies physio-pathologically when part of the body is wrongly identified as alien and is attacked by the immune system. So it could be with mental parts of the self, which are attacked by the mental immune system. It is as if a social body, such as a nation or a religion, decides that part of its population was foreign and decided to annihilate it.

Anyway, in whatever way it arises, connection is the provocation and the psychotic solution is disconnection. This drastic solution means psychotic illness in which survival is dependent on unacknowledged others or some sort of compromise that evades complete disconnection while avoiding the catastrophic object relationship. A pathological organisation producing a neurosis or personality disorder is one such compromise. I shall describe one particular example where self and object are psychically interchangeable as if they were two halves of one object.

This alternating system, which I have described elsewhere as the basis of as-if personality (Britton, 1998), is only possible in a dyadic relationship. If the object has a visible relationship independently of the self, the subject–object identity is fractured. This can be avoided by splitting the ego in the way Freud described as disavowal. In this case, the subject–object relationship was maintained by severing the psychic connections between the two parental figures.

I would like to begin my discussion of just such a defensive organisation from the analysis of a patient, Mr B, whom I shall discuss. His dreams showed his fear of projection because of the terrifying, inescapable, external world he would create if he amalgamated his inner objects with external objects. His fear of introjection was as great because of the substantive reality it would give to his phantasied internal, savagely consuming objects.

He lived psychically, therefore neither internally nor externally, but in no-man’s-land. His aim in analysis was to find agreement, not to adopt my ideas or to impose his own. His technique was either to find a way to stimulate an interpretation corresponding to his already existing idea, or to tread water with vague, verbose material until I made an interpretation which he could then illustrate with his associations. We were like the pantomime horse, two men in one skin. He had dream images that illustrated the relationship: for example, two men in one shirt, each with one arm in each sleeve. In another dream, he and his mother were driving a car, each with a hand on either side of the steering wheel. Alternating with this was another car that had the same arrangement but in this it was with his father.

When he first came to analysis, he had virtually no childhood memories but made a few fixed statements about the past that were invariant; his accounts of them were always couched in the same phrases. One such statement was that his parents lived in the same house, but on different floors, throughout his childhood. Subsequently, it became clear that the reality of their relationship gave some substance to this account but that it was a caricature. It served to structure his...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• IPA PUBLICATIONS COMMITTEE
• ABOUT THE EDITORS AND CONTRIBUTORS
• FOREWORD
• INTRODUCTION
• Original Papers
• "Attacks on Linking" Revisited
• INDEX