Bion was….interesting. He seemed to delight in provocation. He developed his theories from working with an experimental group, self-referred ordinary people with no particular pathology or origin. He was frank in stating that his groups were not intended to be therapeutic, a statement which evidently impelled the group members to look for therapeutic benefit and to complain to him when they felt he was falling short of their expectations. He did not make individual interpretations based on individual histories or behaviors. Rather, he made statements characterizing the behavior or mood of the group as a whole, and he made these statements in object-relation terms, untranslated. That is, he did not say, “You are frustrated by the hard truth I am presenting you with, telling yourself that I mean to harm you.” He might say something like, “The group is suckling at the bad breast.”
But, to everyone’s surprise and I do mean mine, Bion’s group members ended by feeling that they had benefited from the experience. There is something to be said for making true statements about the events unfolding in front of us. One of Bion’s enduringly useful concepts is attacks on linking. Strictly speaking, he was referring to patients’ efforts to disrupt the bond between patient and therapist; more generally, the concept refers to efforts of people suffering certain kinds of pathology, or having suffered certain kinds of events, to disrupt the emotional bond between themselves and others in a caretaking capacity. Let’s set some context..
In the Trump family, Mary Trump fell seriously ill when Donald was 30 months old. She had given birth to his younger brother nine months earlier, and complications from that birth had gone undiagnosed. She underwent three surgeries within a span of ten days, and took months to recover. At that time, there were already four children: Maryanne 12, Freddy 10, Elizabeth 6, and, Donald.
Fred Trump was devoted primarily to his business and is reported as finding the suffering unbearable, or at least intolerable. He kept 12-hour days and felt he had worked enough when he came home. By Mary Trump’s [niece of Donald, granddaughter of Fred] account, Fred also believed that giving in to emotions or needs of any sort would make a child “soft” and that the goal of parenting was to raise kids to be “killers”—ruthless in pursuing financial success. That is to say, his goal, when he took any interest in the children at all. Only boys were valued; girls were advised to go to secretarial school. Mary Trump the mother, who came from a hard-up working class background, had a housekeeper to do the cleaning, but Mary did all the cooking and childcare. I speculate that this was not only a matter of Fred’s notorious tightness regarding spending money, but also their mutual notions of what a suitable role was for a wife. Mary was a younger child of ten, and her mother also was regarded as cold. Or maybe simply tired, but it’s hard for a child to tell.
At any rate, while Mary Trump mother was hospitalized, who took care of the children? She recovered slowly, over a period of months. Who engaged with the children during that time? No one seems to remember exactly. Maryanne, who was 12, remembers bathing the younger ones. Fred’s mother, who lived nearby, provided meals, but, like Fred and his father, was remote emotionally. To some extent, the older children looked after the younger ones; still, a nine-month-old baby can be pretty overwhelming. And a rambunctious toddler in the middle of the terrible twos is a handful under even the best circumstances. Summarizing author Mary Trump’s wealth of incident and detail leads me to conclude that basic physical needs, on which our young existence depends, were unreliably met, never mind emotional needs. She elucidates other issues as well, such father Fred being perpetually dissatisfied with all his children, and fastening on Donald to be his shiny façade in the Manhattan world of influence and big money.
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