Featured Book
Bronstein, C. and O'Shaughnessy, E. (Eds) (2017) :
Attacks on Linking Revisited. A New Look at Bion's Classic Work, London, Karnac.
This book is part of the series on Psychoanalytic Classics Revisited, published under the auspices of the International Psychoanalytical Association. The aim of the series is to make available to psychoanalysts and other scholars in related fields a reinterpretation of important psychoanalytical works that have marked and influenced the development of psychoanalytic theory and practice. Bion’s Attacks on Linking is a classic paper that has deepened the understanding of psychotic processes and profoundly influenced psychoanalytic understanding across different schools of thought.
The chapters included in this book have been written by a distinguished group of scholars from across the world and who hold different theoretical perspectives. They are Ronald Britton, Clara Nemas, Rachel Blass, Rudi Vermote, Elizabeth Lima da Rocha Barros and Ellias Mallet da Rocha Barros, Christine Anzieu-Premmereur, Monica Horovitz, Antonino Ferro, and Edna O’Shaughnessy. I wrote the Introduction, and there is a Foreword by Jay Greenberg. The book includes Bion’s original paper as it was published in the book Second Thoughts, as well as the Commentary that he wrote for the book.
Inspired by Freud and by Melanie Klein, Bion’s interest in psychotic processes took him to develop highly original ideas that continued to inform and feed his future developments. Freud’s distinction between the pleasure principle and the reality principle was central to Bion’s thinking. He was also inspired by Freud’s paper Neurosis and Psychosis (1924) with its emphasis on the reality principle, the psychotic’s hatred of reality, and the development of verbal thought. Bion was particularly interested in our attitude to reality and on the distinction between measures to evade and to modify reality (‘reality’ taken as a term including both external and internal reality).
All the papers contained in the collection published in Second Thoughts share some common ideas linked to these processes, such as the influence of heightened destructive impulses, the role of splitting and projective identification, the peculiarity of the schizophrenic’s object relations, the use of language in psychotic processes (as a mode of action, as a method of communication and as a mode of thought), and the role of depression linked to the destruction of the object.
Bion placed particular importance on the role of the primal scene and the attacks on the reality of the parental intercourse in schizophrenia. The impact of the conflict between the life and death drives, and the dread of annihilation, were central to his thinking. Among the many different contributions in his papers published in Second Thoughts we can distinguish the central importance of the role of projective identification and the notion that splitting processes are extended to the links within thought processes themselves. When the links are attacked the formation of symbols is deeply affected. Bion’s seminal idea that the patient might make:
“… destructive attacks… on anything which is felt to have the function of linking one object with another” is of great clinical help.
The authors in this volume have addressed different aspects of Bion’s contribution, presenting further explorations on the notion of projective identification, on unconscious phantasy, on the role of the object such as the experience of an ‘obstructive object’, on defences from unbearable pain and deprivation, and on studying the process of dreaming and thinking . In Attacks on linking we are reminded of a catastrophe that remains vital and yet it is incapable of being resolved. The notion is explored further through studying the relationship between catastrophe and a primary traumatic problem linked to failure of normal projective identification. Early trauma, and the interference on the child’s capacity for symbolisation caused by the interpersonal effect of parental destructiveness on the child, are important themes that together with the role of envy, the difficulties in bearing dependency on the object, and a sense of psychic allergy to foreign objects, form important aspects in the different contributions to this book.
Quoting Howard Levine, “This volume …offers readers a profound and vital excursion into current Bion scholarship at the frontiers of contemporary psychoanalytic theory and technique”.
The Editors of the book hope that the reader will be inspired by these different and new ways of reading, understanding and applying the concepts originally developed by Bion – a living proof of the brilliance of Attacks on linking.
Catalina Bronstein
Fellow and Training Analyst
British Psychoanalytical Society
Visiting professor, Psychoanalysis Unit, University College London
Attacks on Linking Revisited. A New Look at Bion's Classic Work, London, Karnac.
This book is part of the series on Psychoanalytic Classics Revisited, published under the auspices of the International Psychoanalytical Association. The aim of the series is to make available to psychoanalysts and other scholars in related fields a reinterpretation of important psychoanalytical works that have marked and influenced the development of psychoanalytic theory and practice. Bion’s Attacks on Linking is a classic paper that has deepened the understanding of psychotic processes and profoundly influenced psychoanalytic understanding across different schools of thought.
The chapters included in this book have been written by a distinguished group of scholars from across the world and who hold different theoretical perspectives. They are Ronald Britton, Clara Nemas, Rachel Blass, Rudi Vermote, Elizabeth Lima da Rocha Barros and Ellias Mallet da Rocha Barros, Christine Anzieu-Premmereur, Monica Horovitz, Antonino Ferro, and Edna O’Shaughnessy. I wrote the Introduction, and there is a Foreword by Jay Greenberg. The book includes Bion’s original paper as it was published in the book Second Thoughts, as well as the Commentary that he wrote for the book.
Inspired by Freud and by Melanie Klein, Bion’s interest in psychotic processes took him to develop highly original ideas that continued to inform and feed his future developments. Freud’s distinction between the pleasure principle and the reality principle was central to Bion’s thinking. He was also inspired by Freud’s paper Neurosis and Psychosis (1924) with its emphasis on the reality principle, the psychotic’s hatred of reality, and the development of verbal thought. Bion was particularly interested in our attitude to reality and on the distinction between measures to evade and to modify reality (‘reality’ taken as a term including both external and internal reality).
All the papers contained in the collection published in Second Thoughts share some common ideas linked to these processes, such as the influence of heightened destructive impulses, the role of splitting and projective identification, the peculiarity of the schizophrenic’s object relations, the use of language in psychotic processes (as a mode of action, as a method of communication and as a mode of thought), and the role of depression linked to the destruction of the object.
Bion placed particular importance on the role of the primal scene and the attacks on the reality of the parental intercourse in schizophrenia. The impact of the conflict between the life and death drives, and the dread of annihilation, were central to his thinking. Among the many different contributions in his papers published in Second Thoughts we can distinguish the central importance of the role of projective identification and the notion that splitting processes are extended to the links within thought processes themselves. When the links are attacked the formation of symbols is deeply affected. Bion’s seminal idea that the patient might make:
“… destructive attacks… on anything which is felt to have the function of linking one object with another” is of great clinical help.
The authors in this volume have addressed different aspects of Bion’s contribution, presenting further explorations on the notion of projective identification, on unconscious phantasy, on the role of the object such as the experience of an ‘obstructive object’, on defences from unbearable pain and deprivation, and on studying the process of dreaming and thinking . In Attacks on linking we are reminded of a catastrophe that remains vital and yet it is incapable of being resolved. The notion is explored further through studying the relationship between catastrophe and a primary traumatic problem linked to failure of normal projective identification. Early trauma, and the interference on the child’s capacity for symbolisation caused by the interpersonal effect of parental destructiveness on the child, are important themes that together with the role of envy, the difficulties in bearing dependency on the object, and a sense of psychic allergy to foreign objects, form important aspects in the different contributions to this book.
Quoting Howard Levine, “This volume …offers readers a profound and vital excursion into current Bion scholarship at the frontiers of contemporary psychoanalytic theory and technique”.
The Editors of the book hope that the reader will be inspired by these different and new ways of reading, understanding and applying the concepts originally developed by Bion – a living proof of the brilliance of Attacks on linking.
Catalina Bronstein
Fellow and Training Analyst
British Psychoanalytical Society
Visiting professor, Psychoanalysis Unit, University College London
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