In perhaps his most famous essay, Attacks on Linking , Wilfred Bion charted how destructive forces in the psyche mitigate against processes of thinking and emotional integration. When painful or confusing emotions threaten to overwhelm the ego, Bion proposed that attacks on linking defensively destroy meaning and curtail insight. This destructiveness has a total quality; it is an attack on thinking and on thought itself. Then, the analyst’s task is to contain projected bits of unmetabolized perception which becomes a struggle to restore the capacity for thinking at the most basic level. We asked our contributors to revisit Bion’s influential essay as they experience it in this moment when attacks on core human values and social norms are tragically ubiquitous as is an attack on the Earth itself.

Stephen Hartman, Ph.D. and Lauren Levine, Ph.D.

Joint Editors-in-Chief, Psychoanalytic Dialogues