Attacks on linking or a drive to communicate?

What is it about?

The urge to communicate, alongside the difficulty to communicate, are the Ariadne's thread running throughout Bion's work, and a very powerful driving force in his need to write. He seems to never cease to reiterate the frustration and suffering he feels in the face of the inability to communicate the emotional experience. Bion is always stressing the coexistence of the psychotic and non-psychotic parts of the mind. Thus, it is suggested that attacks on linking as described by Bion, depicts a patient's primitive and unconscious attempt to communicate an emotional experience he cannot do otherwise, and that this experience in which patient's and/or analyst's thought is being attacked is thus a communication and not only an attack on communication. At times, the patient's material may seem incoherent but incoherence might be the communication the patient is trying to convey. Clinical material illustrates how splitting, fragmentation and numbing of the patient's and analyst's thinking may be signs pointing to the possibility of a primitive catastrophe being re-lived in the psychoanalytic setting. This may enhance the analytic couple's capacity to get in touch with primitive, irrepresentable, encapsulated parts of the Self and with the unrepressed unconscious.

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