Attacks on Linking: Musings on Psychic Survival

Current US leadership lands us in a living, breathing “Attack on Linking;” a dark turning point in our history with catastrophic processes creating challenges to democracy. Bion understood catastrophic attacks on the psychic apparatus occurring when the self is linked with “unknowable and unthinkable” realities; attacks on linking impede the psyche’s ability to symbolize and metabolize these realities (Bion, 1959). With America’s authoritarianism, what seems to be a rising fascism, we see freedoms coopted into dark, threatening aesthetics. This reflects Walter Benjamin’s condemnation of fascism as “… the triumph of a false aesthetics over ethical and human values” (Stewart, 2010). As the current administration severs links to whatever threatens it; this is clearly an attack on linking on a societal level, to the threat Democracy poses.

Self-Silencing

Analysts have seen trauma states threaten cohesion, even survival of the self, when paranoid projections, too difficult to bear, are expelled. Attacks, on links to present reality, render the self incapable of integrating thoughts, feelings and ideals. When trauma interrupts pathways to ideals and vitality, shame states and self-silencing intrude (Morrison, 2009); psychic organization is halted, ultimately impeding psychic survival. Within linear registers of self-annihilation the living breathing container that once held us becomes brittle.

My patient John’s family had endured an oppressive authoritarian, political regime. Living in the US, now observing mandates of “un-freedoms” from the new administration, he’s become progressively depressed, vulnerable and terrified. I had not picked up the extremes in his narrative until recently when in a trancelike way he shared: “The sun was going down, darkness moved in. I knew where