Bion - Attacks On Linking

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© The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 2013

Volume LXXXII, Number 2
Attacks on Linking
By W. R. Bion
In previous papers (3) I have had occasion, in talking of the psychotic

part of the personality, to speak of the destructive attacks which the pa-
tient makes on anything which is felt to have the function of linking
one object with another. It is my intention in this paper to show the
significance of this form of destructive attack in the production of some
symptoms met with in borderline psychosis.
The prototype for all the links of which I wish to speak is the primi-
tive breast or penis. The paper presupposes familiarity with Melanie
Klein’s descriptions of the infant’s fantasies of sadistic attacks upon the
breast (6), of the infant’s splitting of its objects, of projective identifica-
tion, which is the name she gives to the mechanism by which parts of the
personality are split off and projected into external objects, and finally
her views on early stages of Oedipus complex (5). I shall discuss phanta-
sied attacks on the breast as the prototype of all attacks on objects that
serve as a link and projective identification as the mechanism employed
by the psyche to dispose of the ego fragments produced by its destruc-
tiveness.
I shall first describe clinical manifestations in an order dictated not
by the chronology of their appearance in the consulting room, but by
the need for making the exposition of my thesis as clear as I can. I shall
Editor’s Note: This paper was originally published in the International Journal of Psycho-
analysis, Vol. 40 (1959), pp. 308-315. The Psychoanalytic Quarterly thanks Wiley-Blackwell
for permission to republish this paper. The Quarterly also thanks Psychoanalytic Electron-
ic Publishing for providing electronic text of it.
In the original publication, the following note appeared at the bottom of the first
page:
(Received 15 December, 1958.) Paper read before the British Psycho-Analytical So-
ciety on 20 October, 1957.
As in the original publication, citations are indicated in the text by parenthetical
numerals, which correspond to numbered entries in the reference list.
285
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286 W. R. BION
follow this by material selected to demonstrate the order which these

mechanisms assume when their relationship to each other is determined
by the dynamics of the analytic situation. I shall conclude with theoret-
ical observations on the material presented. The examples are drawn
from the analysis of two patients and are taken from an advanced stage
of their analyses. To preserve anonymity I shall not distinguish between
the patients and shall introduce distortions of fact which I hope do not
impair the accuracy of the analytic description.
Observation of the patient’s disposition to attack the link between
two objects is simplified because the analyst has to establish a link with
the patient and does this by verbal communication and his equipment
of psycho-analytical experience. Upon this the creative relationship de-
pends and therefore we should be able to see attacks being made upon
it.
I am not concerned with typical resistance to interpretations, but
with expanding references which I made in my paper on “The Differen-
tiation of the Psychotic from the Non-psychotic Part of the Personality”
(3) to the destructive attacks on verbal thought itself.
CLINICAL EXAMPLES
I shall now describe occasions which afforded me an opportunity to give
the patient an interpretation, which at that point he could understand,
of conduct designed to destroy whatever it was that linked two objects
together.
These are the examples:
i. I had reason to give the patient an interpretation making explicit
his feelings of affection and his expression of them to his mother for her
ability to cope with a refractory child. The patient attempted to express
his agreement with me, but although he needed to say only a few words
his expression of them was interrupted by a very pronounced stammer
which had the effect of spreading out his remark over a period of as
much as a minute and a half. The actual sounds emitted bore resem-
blance to gasping for breath; gaspings were interspersed with gurgling
sounds as if he were immersed in water. I drew his attention to these
sounds and he agreed that they were peculiar and himself suggested the
descriptions I have just given.
ATTACKS ON LINKING 287

ii. The patient complained that he could not sleep. Showing signs
of fear, he said, “It can’t go on like this.” Disjointed remarks gave the
impression that he felt superficially that some catastrophe would occur,
perhaps akin to insanity, if he could not get more sleep. Referring to ma-
terial in the previous session I suggested that he feared he would dream
if he were to sleep. He denied this and said he could not think because
he was wet. I reminded him of his use of the term “wet” as an expres-
sion of contempt for somebody he regarded as feeble and sentimental.
He disagreed and indicated that the state to which he referred was the
exact opposite. From what I knew of this patient I felt that his correc-
tion at this point was valid and that somehow the wetness referred to
an expression of hatred and envy such as he associated with urinary at-
tacks on an object. I therefore said that in addition to the superficial
fear which he had expressed he was afraid of sleep because for him it
was the same thing as the oozing away of his mind itself. Further asso-
ciations showed that he felt that good interpretations from me were so
consistently and minutely split up by him that they became mental urine
which then seeped uncontrollably away. Sleep was therefore inseparable
from unconsciousness, which was itself identical with a state of mindless-
ness which could not be repaired. He said, “I am dry now.” I replied that
he felt he was awake and capable of thought, but that this good state was
only precariously maintained.
iii. In this session the patient had produced material stimulated by
the preceding week-end break. His awareness of such external stimuli
had become demonstrable at a comparatively recent stage of the anal-
ysis. Previously it was a matter for conjecture how much he was capable
of appreciating reality. I knew that he had contact with reality because he
came for analysis by himself, but that fact could hardly be deduced from
his behaviour in the sessions. When I interpreted some associations as
evidence that he felt he had been and still was witnessing an intercourse
between two people, he reacted as if he had received a violent blow. I
was not then able to say just where he had experienced the assault and
even in retrospect I have no clear impression. It would seem logical to
suppose that the shock had been administered by my interpretation and
that therefore the blow came from without, but my impression is that he
felt it as delivered from within; the patient often experienced what he
288 W. R. BION
described as a stabbing attack from inside. He sat up and stared intently

into space. I said that he seemed to be seeing something. He replied that
he could not see what he saw. I was able from previous experience to
interpret that he felt he was “seeing” an invisible object and subsequent
experience convinced me that in the two patients on whose analysis I
am depending for material for this paper, events occurred in which the
patient experienced invisible-visual hallucinations. I shall give my rea-
sons later for supposing that in this and the previous example similar
mechanisms were at work.
iv. In the first twenty minutes of the session the patient made three
isolated remarks which had no significance for me. He then said that it
seemed that a girl he had met was understanding. This was followed at
once by a violent, convulsive movement which he affected to ignore. It
appeared to be identical with the kind of stabbing attack I mentioned
in the last example. I tried to draw his attention to the movement, but
he ignored my intervention as he ignored the attack. He then said that
the room was filled with a blue haze. A little later he remarked that
the haze had gone, but said he was depressed. I interpreted that he felt
understood by me. This was an agreeable experience, but the pleasant
feeling of being understood had been instantly destroyed and ejected. I
reminded him that we had recently witnessed his use of the word “blue”
as a compact description of vituperative sexual conversation. If my in-
terpretation was correct, and subsequent events suggested that it was,
it meant that the experience of being understood had been split up,
converted into particles of sexual abuse and ejected. Up to this point I
felt that the interpretation approximated closely to his experience. Later
interpretations, that the disappearance of the haze was due to reintro-
jection and conversion into depression, seemed to have less reality for
the patient, although later events were compatible with its being correct.
v. The session, like the one in my last example, began with three or
four statements of fact such as that it was hot, that his train was crowded,
and that it was Wednesday; this occupied thirty minutes. An impression
that he was trying to retain contact with reality was confirmed when he
followed up by saying that he feared a breakdown. A little later he said I
would not understand him. I interpreted that he felt I was bad and would
not take in what he wanted to put into me. I interpreted in these terms

deliberately because he had shown in the previous session that he felt
that my interpretations were an attempt to eject feelings that he wished
to deposit in me. His response to my interpretation was to say that he
felt there were two probability clouds in the room. I interpreted that he
was trying to get rid of the feeling that my badness was a fact. I said it
meant that he needed to know whether I was really bad or whether I was
some bad thing which had come from inside him. Although the point
was not at the moment of central significance I though the patient was
attempting to decide whether he was hallucinated or not. This recurrent
anxiety in his analysis was associated with his fear that envy and hatred of
a capacity for understanding was leading him to take in a good, under-
standing object to destroy and eject it—a procedure which had often led
to persecution by the destroyed and ejected object. Whether my refusal
to understand was a reality or hallucination was important only because
it determined what painful experiences were to be expected next.
vi. Half the session passed in silence; the patient then announced
that a piece of iron had fallen on the floor. Thereafter he made a series
of convulsive movements in silence as if he felt he was being physically
assaulted from within. I said he could not establish contact with me be-
cause of his fear of what was going on inside him. He confirmed this
by saying that he felt he was being murdered. He did not know what
he would do without the analysis as it made him better. I said that he
felt so envious of himself and of me for being able to work together to
make him feel better that he took the pair of us into him as a dead piece
of iron and a dead floor that came together not to give him life but to
murder him. He became very anxious and said he could not go on. I
said that he felt he could not go on because he was either dead, or alive
and so envious that he had to stop good analysis. There was a marked
decrease of anxiety, but the remainder of the session was taken up by iso-
lated statements of fact which again seemed to be an attempt to preserve
contact with external reality as a method of denial of his phantasies.
FEATURES COMMON TO THE

ABOVE ILLUSTRATIONS
These episodes have been chosen by me because the dominant theme
in each was the destructive attack on a link. In the first the attack was
290 W. R. BION
expressed in a stammer which was designed to prevent the patient from

using language as a bond between him and me. In the second sleep was
felt by him to be identical with projective identification that proceeded
unaffected by any possible attempt at control by him. Sleep for him
meant that his mind, minutely fragmented, flowed out in an attacking
stream of particles.
The examples I give here throw light on schizophrenic dreaming.
The psychotic patient appears to have no dreams, or at least not to re-
port any, until comparatively late in the analysis. My impression now is
that this apparently dreamless period is a phenomenon analogous to
the invisible-visual hallucination. That is to say, that the dreams consist
of material so minutely fragmented that they are devoid of any visual
component. When dreams are experienced which the patient can report
because visual objects have been experienced by him in the course of
the dream, he seems to regard these objects as bearing much the same
relationship to the invisible objects of the previous phase as faeces seem
to him to bear to urine. The objects appearing in experiences which
we call dreams are regarded by the patient as solid and are, as such,
contrasted with the contents of the dreams which were a continuum of
minute, invisible fragments.
At the time of the session the main theme was not an attack on the
link but the consequences of such an attack, previously made, in leaving
him bereft of a state of mind necessary for the establishment of a satis-
fying relationship between him and his bed. Though it did not appear
in the session I report, uncontrollable projective identification, which
was what sleep meant to him, was thought to be a destructive attack on
the state of mind of the coupling parents. There was therefore a double
anxiety; one arising from his fear that he was being rendered mindless,
the other from his fear that he was unable to control his hostile attacks,
his mind providing the ammunition, on the state of mind that was the
link between the parental pair. Sleep and sleeplessness were alike inac-
ceptable.
In the third example in which I described visual hallucinations of
invisible objects, we witness one form in which the actual attack on the
sexual pair is delivered. My interpretation, as far as I could judge, was
felt by him as if it were his own visual sense of a parental intercourse; this

visual impression is minutely fragmented and ejected at once in particles
so minute that they are the invisible components of a continuum. The
total procedure has served the purpose of forestalling an experience of
feelings of envy for the parental state of mind by the instantaneous ex-
pression of envy in a destructive act. I shall have more to say of this im-
plicit hatred of emotion and the need to avoid awareness of it.
In my fourth example, the report of the understanding girl and the
haze, my understanding and his agreeable state of mind have been felt
as a link between us which could give rise to a creative act. The link had
been regarded with hate and transformed into a hostile and destructive
sexuality rendering the patient-analyst couple sterile.
In my fifth example, of the two probability clouds, a capacity for
understanding is the link which is being attacked, but the interest lies
in the fact that the object making the destructive attacks is alien to the
patient. Furthermore, the destroyer is making an attack on projective
identification which is felt by the patient to be a method of communi-
cation. In so far as my supposed attack on his methods of communica-
tion is felt as possibly secondary to his envious attacks on me, he does
not dissociate himself from feelings of guilt and responsibility. A further
point is the appearance of judgement, which Freud regards as an essen-
tial feature of the dominance of the reality principle, among the ejected
parts of the patient’s personality. The fact that there were two probability
clouds remained unexplained at the time, but in subsequent sessions I
had material which led me to suppose that what had originally been an
attempt to separate good from bad survived in the existence of two ob-
jects, but they were now similar in that each was a mixture of good and
bad. Taking into consideration material from later sessions, I can draw
conclusions which were not possible at the time; his capacity for judg-
ment, which had been split up and destroyed with the rest of his ego and
then ejected, was felt by him to be similar to other bizarre objects of the
kind which I have described in my paper on “The Differentiation of the
Psychotic from the Non-Psychotic parts of the Personality.” These ejected
particles were feared because of the treatment he had accorded them.
He felt that the alienated judgment—the probability clouds—indicated
that I was probably bad. His suspicion that the probability clouds were
persecutory and hostile led him to doubt the value of the guidance they
292 W. R. BION
afforded him. They might supply him with a correct assessment or a de-
liberately false one, such as that a fact was an hallucination or vice versa;
or would give rise to what, from a psychiatric point of view, we would
call delusions. The probability clouds themselves had some qualities of a
primitive breast and were felt to be enigmatic and intimidating.
In my sixth illustration, the report that a piece of iron had fallen
on the floor, I had no occasion for interpreting an aspect of the mate-
rial with which the patient had by this time become familiar. (I should
perhaps say that experience had taught me that there were times when
I assumed the patient’s familiarity with some aspect of a situation with
which we were dealing, only to discover that, in spite of the work that
had been done upon it, he had forgotten it.) The familiar point that
I did not interpret, but which is significant for the understanding of
this episode, is that the patient’s envy of the parental couple had been
evaded by his substitution of himself and myself for the parents. The eva-
sion failed, for the envy and hatred were now directed against him and
me. The couple engaged in a creative act are felt to be sharing an envi-
able, emotional experience; he, being identified also with the excluded
party, has a painful, emotional experience as well. On many occasions
the patient, partly through experiences of the kind which I describe in
this episode, and partly for reasons on which I shall enlarge later, had a
hatred of emotion, and therefore, by a short extension, of life itself. This
hatred contributes to the murderous attack on that which links the pair,
on the pair itself and on the object generated by the pair. In the episode
I am describing, the patient is suffering the consequences of his early at-
tacks on the state of mind that forms the link between the creative pair
and his identification with both the hateful and creative states of mind.
In this and the preceding illustration there are elements that sug-
gest the formation of a hostile persecutory object, or agglomeration of
objects, which expresses its hostility in a manner which is of great im-
portance in producing the predominance of psychotic mechanisms in
a patient; the characteristics with which I have already invested the ag-
glomeration of persecutory objects have the quality of a primitive, and
even murderous, superego.
CURIOSITY, ARROGANCE AND STUPIDITY

In the paper I presented at the International Congress of 1957 (4) I
suggested that Freud’s analogy of an archaeological investigation with a
psycho-analysis was helpful if it were considered that we were exposing
evidence not so much of a primitive civilization as of a primitive disaster.
The value of the analogy is lessened because in the analysis we are con-
fronted not so much with a static situation that permits leisurely study,
but with a catastrophe that remains at one and the same moment ac-
tively vital and yet incapable of resolution into quiescence. This lack of
progress in any direction must be attributed in part to the destruction of
a capacity for curiosity and the consequent inability to learn, but before
I go into this I must say something about a matter that plays hardly any
part in the illustrations I have given.
Attacks on the link originate in what Melanie Klein calls the para-
noid-schizoid phase. This period is dominated by part-object relation-
ships (8). If it is borne in mind that the patient has a part-object rela-
tionship with himself as well as with objects not himself, it contributes
to the understanding of phrases such as “it seems” which are commonly
employed by the deeply disturbed patient on occasions when a less dis-
turbed patient might say “I think” or “I believe.” When he says “it seems”
he is often referring to a feeling—an “it seems” feeling—which is a part
of his psyche and yet is not observed as part of a whole object. The
conception of the part-object as analogous to an anatomical structure,
encouraged by the patient’s employment of concrete images as units of
thought, is misleading because the part-object relationship is not with
the anatomical structures only but with function, not with anatomy but
with physiology, not with the breast but with feeding, poisoning, loving,
hating. This contributes to the impression of a disaster that is dynamic
and not static. The problem that has to be solved on this early, yet su-
perficial, level must be stated in adult terms by the question, “What is
something?” and not the question “Why is something?” because “why”
has, through guilt, been split off. Problems, the solution of which de-
pends upon an awareness of causation, cannot therefore be stated, let
alone solved. This produces a situation in which the patient appears to
294 W. R. BION
have no problems except those posed by the existence of analyst and

patient. His preoccupation is with what is this or that function, of which
he is aware though unable to grasp the totality of which the function is
a part. It follows that there is never any question why the patient or the
analyst is there, or why something is said or done or felt, nor can there
be any question of attempting to alter the causes of some state of mind
. . . . Since “what?” can never be answered without “how?” or “why?”
further difficulties arise. I shall leave this on one side to consider the
mechanisms employed by the infant to solve the problem “what?” when
it is felt in relation to a part-object relationship with a function.
DENIAL OF NORMAL DEGREES OF

PROJECTIVE IDENTIFICATION
I employ the term “link” because I wish to discuss the patient’s relation-
ship with a function rather than with the object that subserves a func-
tion; my concern is not only with the breast, or penis, or verbal thought,
but with their function of providing the link between two objects.
In her Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms (7) Melanie Klein speaks of
the importance of an excessive employment of splitting and projective
identification in the production of a very disturbed personality. She also
speaks of “the introjection of the good object, first of all the mother’s
breast” as a “precondition for normal development.” I shall suppose that
there is a normal degree of projective identification, without defining
the limits within which normality lies, and that associated with introjec-
tive identification this is the foundation on which normal development
rests.
This impression derives partly from a feature in a patient’s analysis
which was difficult to interpret because it did not appear to be suffi-
ciently obtrusive at any moment for an interpretation to be supported
by convincing evidence. Throughout the analysis the patient resorted to
projective identification with a persistence suggesting it was a mechanism
of which he had never been able sufficiently to avail himself; the analysis
afforded him an opportunity for the exercise of a mechanism of which
he had been cheated. I did not have to rely on this impression alone.
There were sessions which led me to suppose that the patient felt there

was some object that denied him the use of projective identification. In
the illustrations I have given, particularly in the first, the stammer, and
the fourth, the understanding girl and the blue haze, there are elements
which indicate that the patient felt that parts of his personality that he
wished to repose in me were refused entry by me, but there had been
associations prior to this which led me to this view.
When the patient strove to rid himself of fears of death which were
felt to be too powerful for his personality to contain he split off his fears
and put them into me, the idea apparently being that if they were al-
lowed to repose there long enough they would undergo modification
by my psyche and could then be safely reintrojected. On the occasion I
have in mind the patient had felt, probably for reasons similar to those I
give in my fifth illustration, the probability clouds, that I evacuated them
so quickly that the feelings were not modified, but had become more
painful.
Associations from a period in the analysis earlier than that from
which these illustrations have been drawn showed an increasing intensity
of emotions in the patient. This originated in what he felt was my refusal
to accept parts of his personality. Consequently he strove to force them
into me with increased desperation and violence. His behaviour, isolated
from the context of the analysis, might have appeared to be an expres-
sion of primary aggression. The more violent his phantasies of projec-
tive identification, the more frightened he became of me. There were
sessions in which such behaviour expressed unprovoked aggression, but
I quote this series because it shows the patient in a different light, his
violence a reaction to what he felt was my hostile defensiveness. The
analytic situation built up in my mind a sense of witnessing an extremely
early scene. I felt that the patient had experienced in infancy a mother
who dutifully responded to the infant’s emotional displays. The dutiful
response had in it an element of impatient “I don’t know what’s the
matter with the child.” My deduction was that in order to understand
what the child wanted the mother should have treated the infant’s cry
as more than a demand for her presence. From the infant’s point of
view she should have taken into her, and thus experienced, the fear that
the child was dying. It was this fear that the child could not contain. He
strove to split it off together with the part of the personality in which it
296 W. R. BION
lay and project it into the mother. An understanding mother is able to

experience the feeling of dread, that this baby was striving to deal with
by projective identification, and yet retain a balanced outlook. This pa-
tient had had to deal with a mother who could not tolerate experiencing
such feelings and reacted either by denying them ingress, or alterna-
tively by becoming a prey to the anxiety which resulted from introjection
of the infant’s feelings. The latter reaction must, I think, have been rare:
denial was dominant.
To some this reconstruction will appear to be unduly fanciful; to me
it does not seem forced and is the reply to any who may object that too
much stress is placed on the transference to the exclusion of a proper
elucidation of early memories.
In the analysis a complex situation may be observed. The patient
feels he is being allowed an opportunity of which he had hitherto been
cheated; the poignancy of his deprivation is thereby rendered the more
acute and so are the feelings of resentment at the deprivation. Gratitude
for the opportunity coexists with hostility to the analyst as the person who
will not understand and refuses the patient the use of the only method
of communication by which he feels he can make himself understood.
Thus the link between patient and analyst, or infant and breast, is the
mechanism of projective identification. The destructive attacks upon this
link originate in a source external to the patient or infant, namely the
analyst or breast. The result is excessive projective identification by the
patient and a deterioration of his developmental processes.
I do not put forward this experience as the cause of the patient’s
disturbance; that finds its main source in the inborn disposition of the
infant as I described it in my paper on “The Differentiation of the Psy-
chotic from the Non-psychotic Part of the Personality” (3). I regard it as
a central feature of the environmental factor in the production of the
psychotic personality.
Before I discuss this consequence for the patient’s development,
I must refer to 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 seriousness of these attacks
is enhanced if the mother displays the kind of unreceptiveness which
I have described, and is diminished, but not abolished, if the mother

can introject the infant’s feelings and remain balanced (9); the serious-
ness remains because the psychotic infant is overwhelmed with hatred
and envy of the mother’s ability to retain a comfortable state of mind
although experiencing the infant’s feelings. This was clearly brought out
by a patient who insisted that I must go through it with him, but was
filled with hate when he felt I was able to do so without a breakdown.
Here we have another aspect of destructive attacks upon the link, the
link being the capacity of the analyst to introject the patient’s projective
identifications. Attacks on the link, therefore, are synonymous with at-
tacks on the analyst’s, and originally the mother’s, peace of mind. The
capacity to introject is transformed by the patient’s envy and hate into
greed devouring the patient’s psyche; similarly, peace of mind becomes
hostile indifference. At this point analytic problems arise through the
patient’s employment (to destroy the peace of mind that is so much en-
vied) of acting out, delinquent acts and threats of suicide.
CONSEQUENCES
To review the main features so far: the origin of the disturbance is two-
fold. On the one hand there is the patient’s inborn disposition to ex-
cessive destructiveness, hatred, and envy: on the other the environment
which, at its worst, denies to the patient the use of the mechanisms of
splitting and projective identification. On some occasions the destructive
attacks on the link between patient and environment, or between dif-
ferent aspects of the patient’s personality, have their origin in the patient;
on others, in the mother, although in the latter instance and in psychotic
patients, it can never be in the mother alone. The disturbances com-
mence with life itself. The problem that confronts the patient is: What
are the objects of which he is aware? These objects, whether internal or
external, are in fact part-objects and predominantly, though not exclu-
sively, what we should call functions and not morphological structures.
This is obscured because the patient’s thinking is conducted by means
of concrete objects and therefore tends to produce, in the sophisticated
mind of the analyst, an impression that the patient’s concern is with the
nature of the concrete object. The nature of the functions which ex-
cite the patient’s curiosity he explores by projective identification. His
298 W. R. BION
own feelings, too powerful to be contained within his personality, are

amongst these functions. Projective identification makes it possible for
him to investigate his own feelings in a personality powerful enough to
contain them. Denial of the use of this mechanism, either by the refusal
of the mother to serve as a repository for the infant’s feelings, or by the
hatred and envy of the patient who cannot allow the mother to exer-
cise this function, leads to a destruction of the link between infant and
breast and consequently to a severe disorder of the impulse to be curious
on which all learning depends. The way is therefore prepared for a se-
vere arrest of development. Furthermore, thanks to a denial of the main
method open to the infant for dealing with his too powerful emotions,
the conduct of emotional life, in any case a severe problem, becomes in-
tolerable. Feelings of hatred are thereupon directed against all emotions
including hate itself, and against external reality which stimulates them.
It is a short step from hatred of the emotions to hatred of life itself. As
I said in my paper on “The Differentiation of the Psychotic from the
Non-psychotic Part of the Personality” (3), this hatred results in a resort
to projective identification of all the perceptual apparatus including the
embryonic thought which forms a link between sense impressions and
consciousness. The tendency to excessive projective identification when
death instincts predominate is thus reinforced.
SUPEREGO
The early development of the superego is effected by this kind of mental
functioning in a way I must now describe. As I have said, the link be-
tween infant and breast depends upon projective identification and a
capacity to introject projective identifications. Failure to introject makes
the external object appear intrinsically hostile to curiosity and to the
method, namely projective identification, by which the infant seeks to
satisfy it. Should the breast be felt as fundamentally understanding, it
has been transformed by the infant’s envy and hate into an object whose
devouring greed has as its aim the introjection of the infant’s projective
identifications in order to destroy them. This can show in the patient’s
belief that the analyst strives, by understanding the patient, to drive him
insane. The result is an object which, when installed in the patient, exer-
cises the function of a severe and ego-destructive superego. This descrip-

tion is not accurate applied to any object in the paranoid-schizoid posi-
tion because it supposes a whole-object. The threat that such a whole-ob-
ject impends contributes to the inability, described by Melanie Klein and
others (11), of the psychotic patient to face the depressive position and
the developments attendant on it. In the paranoid-schizoid phase the
bizarre objects composed partially of elements of a persecutory superego
which I described in my paper on “The Differentiation of the Psychotic
from the Non-psychotic Part of the Personality” are predominant.
ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT
The disturbance of the impulse of curiosity on which all learning de-
pends, and the denial of the mechanism by which it seeks expression,
makes normal development impossible. Another feature obtrudes if the
course of the analysis is favourable; problems which in sophisticated lan-
guage are posed by the question “Why?” cannot be formulated. The pa-
tient appears to have no appreciation of causation and will complain of
painful states of mind while persisting in courses of action calculated to
produce them. Therefore when the appropriate material presents itself
the patient must be shown that he has no interest in why he feels as he
does. Elucidation of the limited scope of his curiosity issues in the de-
velopment of a wider range and an incipient preoccupation with causes.
This leads to some modification of conduct which otherwise prolongs
his distress.
CONCLUSIONS
The main conclusions of this paper relate to that state of mind in which
the patient’s psyche contains an internal object which is opposed to, and
destructive of, all links whatsoever from the most primitive (which I have
suggested is a normal degree of projective identification) to the most
sophisticated forms of verbal communication and the arts.
In this state of mind emotion is hated; it is felt to be too powerful to
be contained by the immature psyche, it is felt to link objects and it gives
reality to objects which are not self and therefore inimical to primary
narcissism.
300 W. R. BION
The internal object which in its origin was an external breast that
refused to introject, harbour, and so modify the baneful force of emo-
tion, is felt, paradoxically, to intensify, relative to the strength of the ego,
the emotions against which it initiates the attacks. 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 math-
ematical, but never emotionally reasonable. Consequently the links sur-
viving are perverse, cruel, and sterile.
The external object which is internalized, its nature, and the ef-
fect when so established on the methods of communication within the
psyche and with the environment, are left for further elaboration later.
REFERENCES
(1) Bion, W. R. (1954). Notes on the Theory of Schizophrenia. Int. J. Psychoanal.

35 pt. II.
(2) ———- (1956). Development of Schizophrenic Thought. Int. J. Psychoanal.
37.
(3) ———- (1957). The Differentiation of the Psychotic from the Non-Psychotic
Part of the Personality. Int. J. Psychoanal. 38 pts. III-IV.
(4) ———- (1957). On Arrogance. Int. Psycho-An. Congress, 1957.
(5) Klein, M. (1928). Early Stages of the Oedipus Conflict.
(6) ———- (1934). A Contribution to the Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive
States. 13th Int. Psycho-An. Congress, 1934.
(7) ———- (1946). Notes on some Schizoid Mechanisms.
(8) ———- 1948 The Theory of Anxiety and Guilt. Int. J. Psychoanal. 29.
(9) ———- (1957). Envy and Gratitude Chap. II. (Tavistock Publications, 1957.)
(10) Rosenfeld, H. (1952). Notes on the Superego Conflict in an Acute Schizo-
phrenic Patient. Int. J. Psychoanal. 33.
(11) Segal, H. (1950). Some Aspects of the Analysis of a Schizophrenic. Int. J.
Psychoanal. 31 pt. IV.
(12) ———- (1956). Depression in the Schizophrenic. Int. J. Psychoanal. 37 pts.
IV-V.
(13) ———- (1957). Notes on Symbol Formation. Int. J. Psychoanal. 38 pt. VI.
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In previous papers (3) I have had occasion, in talking of the psychotic

follow this by material selected to demonstrate the order which these

ATTACKS ON LINKING 287

described as a stabbing attack from inside. He sat up and stared intently

ATTACKS ON LINKING 289

FEATURES COMMON TO THE

expressed in a stammer which was designed to prevent the patient from

ATTACKS ON LINKING 291

ATTACKS ON LINKING 293

CURIOSITY, ARROGANCE AND STUPIDITY

have no problems except those posed by the existence of analyst and

DENIAL OF NORMAL DEGREES OF

ATTACKS ON LINKING 295

lay and project it into the mother. An understanding mother is able to

ATTACKS ON LINKING 297

own feelings, too powerful to be contained within his personality, are

ATTACKS ON LINKING 299

(1) Bion, W. R. (1954). Notes on the Theory of Schizophrenia. Int. J. Psychoanal.

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