Against Literalism: The Sick City, Infanticide, and Attacks on Linking

In a recent conversation with a friend in Beirut in the aftermath of the brutal war that terrorized the country and turned his neighborhood and many others into rubble, I was struck by his frequent use of Arabic words denoting “insanity,” “madness,” “craziness,” and “lunacy,” in describing the people he was encountering in his daily life, on the streets, grocery stores, and other places. I felt that my friend – a deeply perceptive, mature, young man – was perhaps also trying his best to keep his mind together. I said how can these people not look “insane” when the world around them was the one going insane? I added, as if somehow to reassure him, that madness was a desperate response to the unbearable pain of living in a cruel world.

It is no wonder that Bion, who witnessed firsthand the horrors and madness of the first world war, offers us his concept of attacks on linking as a theory of the psychotic mode of thinking. Bion (1959/2013) writes primarily about psychotic modes of thinking in the context of mother–child and analyst–patient relationships. For Bion, when the parent’s ability to contain the infant’s bodily and mental states fails, when the parental “container” is impaired, the infant attacks the linking function in himself (his own mind) and in the parent because linking of sensations, thoughts and feelings leads to the truth about internal and external reality, something unbearable for an infant without a containing environment. Bion (1959/2013) also speaks of the infant/patient’s “inborn disposition to excessive destructiveness, hatred, and envy” (p. 297), what might be considered an intense death drive, which triggers unprovoked attacks on linking, a topic of psychoanalytic debate beyond the scope of this brief essay. These attacks, provoked or unprovoked, leave the individual in a fractured, fragmented, “psychotic” state of mind, which impairs curiosity and learning. Can we apply this concept beyond its originally intended intrapsychic and intersubject