ABSTRACT
A treatment that is suddenly interrupted is a shared traumatic experience, even if it is not immediately recognised or perceived as such. New light is shed retrospectively on the patient and his or her analytic trajectory, revealing resistances or weaknesses that were hitherto unsuspected. In his famous essay of 1959, "Attacks on linking", Bion suggests that, for patients, the analytic relationship is creative, and the unconscious equivalent of the procreative relationship of the parents. The patient attacks his or her own capacity for understanding, the faculty for linking that he or she perceives in the analyst, and also his or her own feelings which are projected on to the analyst with a degree of violence that makes them intolerable for the latter. The powerful and new resistance shown at this stage seemed to come from only one part of her patient's personality, while at the same time another part continued to respond to the analytic work.
