Broken Links, Repeated Acts: Attacks on Linking and the Architecture of OCD

Some rituals are not about fear.

They’re about survival.

And some intrusive thoughts are not warnings.

They’re the echoes of a mind trying — and failing — to make contact with itself.

It is important we do not treat OCD as a behavioural problem.

We treat it as a psychic structure — a system built, often unconsciously, to replace what thinking could not yet do.

In this piece, we’ll explore how attacks on linking — a concept developed by Wilfred Bion — can illuminate the hidden architecture beneath obsessional symptoms.

And why rituals that “don’t make sense” might actually be communicating something vital.

What Is an Attack on Linking?

Wilfred Bion proposed that the mind’s capacity to think is not automatic — it develops.

It develops when experiences are tolerated, named, and symbolised.

When the caregiver receives the baby’s distress, metabolises it, and gives it back in a form the infant can digest.

This is how links are formed — between thought and feeling, self and other, internal and external reality.

But when that process breaks down — when emotion overwhelms or meaning feels dangerous — the mind may turn against its own capacity to link.

An attack on linking is an unconscious assault on the connections between experience and understanding.

It is a psychic refusal to know — because knowing would feel annihilating.

So What Does This Have to Do With OCD?

More than we think.

Let’s consider a young person with OCD who washes their hands repeatedly after having a disturbing thought about someone they love getting hurt.

They may know the ritual is irrational.

They may say, “I don’t really believe it will stop anything.”

And yet — they still do it.

This is not just a failure of logic.

It’s an attack on the mind’s linking function.

The link between thought and feeling

The link between symbol and emotion

The link between internal fear and external representation

— all of these are under siege.

And when those links are broken, what replaces them?

Action. Ritual. Repetition.

Magical Thinking and the Psychotic Part of the Personality

Bion suggested that even in healthy minds, there exists a psychotic part of the personality — a fragment that cannot tolerate uncertainty, emotional truth, or contact with the unknown.

In some obsessional states, we see this part take control.

• A child touches the doorknob seven times to prevent an accident.

• An adolescent repeats a phrase internally to “cancel” a violent thought.

These are not simply anxious behaviours.

They are attempts to construct certainty where linking has failed.

The ritual becomes a substitute for a thought that cannot yet be thought.

And so, magical thinking becomes the scaffolding that holds the psyche up — just barely.

Knowing vs. Believing — A Split in the Obsessional Mind

In many young people with OCD, we observe a striking split:

• Part of them knows the thought is illogical

• Another part believes it with force

• And the two cannot be brought together

This conflict is not just intellectual. It is structural.

It reflects a deeper rupture in the linking apparatus of the mind.

Where symbols should form, repetition forms instead.

Where thought should metabolise emotion, rituals mute it.

What This Means for Clinical Work

When we treat OCD without understanding this architecture, we risk missing the meaning beneath the act.

Of course ERP can help — but only if the mind is ready to tolerate the links we are asking it to form.

Exposure is not just about habituating to fear.

It is about reintroducing the possibility that experience can be linked — to thought, to feeling, to symbol.

If the mind is still attacking that function, the ritual will return — perhaps transformed, but no less needed.

Our task is not just to disrupt the cycle.

It is to repair the links that make the cycle necessary in the first place.

Final Thoughts

Not all rituals are avoidance.

Some are psychic protest.

Some are grief.

Some are desperate attempts to hold the self together when the links have failed.

As clinicians, we must learn to listen for the broken link — not just the content of the thought, but what was severed behind it.

And if we can bear to think with the young person — even briefly —

we begin the slow work of making thought safe again.