Invisible-Visual Hallucinations in Bion’s “Attacks on Linking”*1

Writing Attacks on Linking, it is as if Bion had listened to his former analyst. In a lecture on technique given the year before, Klein expressed the wish that someone would write “a book about linking […] one of the essential points in analysis”. Later taken up and commented on in Second Thoughts, Attacks on Linking, has become perhaps Bion's most famous paper and, Freud aside, the fourth most cited article in the whole of psychoanalytic literature. In the short and scintillating essay Bion presents the enigmatic and fascinating concept of invisible-visual hallucinations, which subsequently seems never to have been taken up and discussed as such by other scholars. The author's proposal is therefore to reread Bion's text starting from this concept. To try to give a definition that is as clear and distinct as possible, a comparison is made with those of negative hallucination (Freud), dream screen (Lewin), and primitive agony (Winnicott). Finally, the hypothesis is formulated that IVH could give us the model of what stays at the origin of any representation; i.e. a micro-traumatic inscription of the trace of stimuli (but which may come to be actually traumatic) in the psychic fabric.