It often starts with a racing heart, tight chest, or sudden panic—seemingly out of nowhere. There’s no immediate threat, no clear reason. Just a wave of overwhelm that hits the body first. Some people call it stress. Others name it anxiety. But for a lot of people I’ve worked with, it’s actually something deeper.
They might look calm and capable from the outside—doing well, getting things done. But underneath, there’s usually a system that’s running on survival. A lot of them grew up in environments where emotional chaos or unpredictability was normal. And when there was no one to help them process what was happening, they adapted the only way they could: they stopped seeing the pain—because if they didn’t, it would’ve been too much. They would’ve collapsed or gone mad. More accurately, their mind learned how to make it disappear. What should have been noticed or felt just… didn’t register. That’s what we call a blind spot, or in psychodynamic terms, scotomization.
Later in life, it shows up in all kinds of ways—avoiding closeness, feeling detached, struggling with physical symptoms like burnout, hormone dysregulation, or autoimmune flares. And often, they don’t know why they feel the way they do. There’s just this low-grade feeling of being unwell or disconnected, and nothing really explains it.
What I kept seeing—again and again—is that something would surface in a session. A moment of clarity. A truth. Someone would speak about the pain with complete awareness, like something finally clicked into place. But then, within minutes, it would vanish. They’d minimize it, shift the focus, or reframe it until it no longer felt real. It wasn’t a performance. It was the only way their system knew how to stay upright. It was like one part of them saw it, and another part stepped in and said, “Nope. That’s too much.” The moment would slip through their fingers.
That’s the blind spot in action. But it wasn’t just that they couldn’t see it anymore—it was that the mind cut the thread that could have helped them stay connected to it. That’s what I came to understand as an attack on linking.
These two processes—blind spots and broken links—don’t just push down pain. They interrupt a person’s ability to metabolize experience at all. And over time, that changes how someone relates to their body, emotions, memories, and relationships. When something isn’t processed, it doesn’t disappear—it runs your life without you knowing. You start choosing partners who hurt you in familiar ways. You sabotage the good things. You keep ending up in the same situations, not because you want to suffer—but because the pain is still inside you, shaping what feels normal, what feels like love, and what feels like home.
What Is a Blind Spot (Scotomization)?
A blind spot, in psychological terms, is the mind’s way of erasing something from awareness because it would be too painful or threatening to acknowledge. In clinical theory, this is called scotomization.
Unlike repression, which buries feelings deep in the unconscious, scotomization blocks awareness entirely. You don’t just push the memory down—you stop perceiving it altogether. It’s as if the psyche deletes part of reality to survive it. The psyche will choose survival over truth, until it feels safe enough to choose both.
Imagine breaking your leg but not allowing yourself to feel pain. You keep walking, running even, convinced nothing is wrong. Meanwhile, your body starts to collapse under the strain. That’s what psychological blind spots do: they allow us to function while ignoring damage that continues to worsen beneath the surface.
The term originated in early psychoanalytic circles, introduced by René Laforgue and debated by Freud, who believed no perception is truly erased—only actively denied. Still, the image holds: scotomization is a psychic blind spot, maintained by unconscious effort to avoid unbearable reality.
These blind spots are often formed in early life. Children exposed to chaos, neglect, or emotional abuse may learn to block out fear, anger, or grief—not because they’re weak, but because those feelings have nowhere safe to go. Over time, the act of not-seeing becomes automatic.
What’s dangerous is that scotomized material doesn’t disappear. It leaks through the body in quieter ways: chronic fatigue, shallow breathing, or unexplained pain. The person may say, “I’m fine,” while their system is in crisis. But the cost is high: it blocks wisdom, fractures identity, and keeps the nervous system on constant alert. And it doesn’t just cut them off from feeling—it cuts them off from insight. When you can’t see what really happened, you can’t understand it. And if you can’t understand it, you can’t grow from it. You lose the opportunity to turn pain into wisdom. Instead, the experience stays frozen, unfinished, repeating itself in different forms. Without that full awareness, the past doesn’t become the past—it keeps shaping the present.
What Happens When the Mind Destroys Meaning (Attacks on Linking)?
If blind spots are about not seeing, attacks on linking are about the mind destroying the capacity to understand.
Wilfred Bion coined the term “attacks on linking” to describe what happens when a person unconsciously disrupts the connections between thoughts, feelings, and experiences. The person might have emotions but no words, memories but no meaning, sensations but no story. It’s like trying to read a book where the pages are out of order, some sentences are missing, and the most important parts are blacked out. You can sense something is there—but you can’t follow the story. Without those internal links, your ability to process experience breaks down. You’re left with fragments that feel overwhelming, confusing, or completely disconnected from the rest of your life.
This is more than avoidance. It’s a defensive breakdown of mental integration.
In early development, babies don’t know how to make sense of their distress. They rely on their caregiver to help them do it. When a parent consistently notices the baby’s anxiety or rage and responds with calm, attuned presence, the baby begins to learn that what they feel matters—that emotions can be named, understood, and responded to. Over time, this helps them link what they feel in their body to what they need, form thoughts around it, and express it. This is how a sense of self begins to take shape.
But if the caregiver is misattuned, unavailable, or frightening, that process breaks down. The baby still feels overwhelmed, but there’s no safe reflection—no one helping them make sense of what’s happening inside. So the mind adapts: it starts severing the connections. Emotions become dangerous. Thoughts become overloaded. The child stops trusting their own sensations, and instead learns to ignore or shut them down. Over time, they may lose touch with what they need, struggle to explain themselves clearly, or even question whether they have a self at all. The very process of linking experience into meaning and identity is interrupted before it can fully form.
In adults, this often shows up as:
- Not knowing how to explain what you’re feeling
- Feeling overwhelmed but not knowing why
- Getting confused or scattered when emotions come up
- Shutting down when someone asks a hard question
- Avoiding deep conversations because they feel too intense
- Struggling to put words to your needs—or not even knowing what they are
- Feeling like you’re going through the motions but disconnected from who you really are
- Saying you’re fine while your body feels tense, numb, or exhausted
Imagine someone starting to talk about their trauma—and suddenly, they change the subject, laugh, or go blank. That’s an attack on linking. The mind instinctively severs the connection to stay safe.
Bion considered this one of the most severe but common defense mechanisms—an unconscious act of violence against meaning-making. He believed it stemmed from early relational trauma and persisted because linking now feels like danger.
How Blind Spots and Attacks on Linking Work Together
This is where they converge. A blind spot (scotomization) erases the original perception of pain. An attack on linking stops that pain from ever being made sense of. One hides the injury; the other destroys the internal ability to track, reflect, or repair. What’s dangerous is that blind spots and broken links don’t just protect us from pain—they block our capacity for integration. When a moment can’t be metabolized, it doesn’t disappear. It stays lodged in the system, influencing what we expect, what we tolerate, and what we repeat.
Earlier, we used the analogy of a broken leg that the person can’t feel. Attacks on linking take it a step further: it’s like someone finally noticing the limp and asking if you’re okay—and instead of considering it, you shut down, change the subject, or say it’s not a big deal. The mind cuts off the very process that would allow for recognition and healing.
This is how people end up carrying invisible injuries for years. Their body suffers. Their relationships suffer. But because the internal wiring that would make sense of the pain is damaged, they can’t trace the source. They may know something is wrong, but they can’t locate it clearly enough to respond.
These aren’t signs of failure. They’re signs of past adaptation—strategies the psyche used to survive what felt unbearable at the time. But in adulthood, the same defenses that once kept the person safe can quietly become the reason they stay stuck.
How This Shows Up In Life
People with these defenses may be highly competent yet emotionally inaccessible. They may intellectualize pain, minimize relationships, or avoid vulnerability at all costs. They might even help others make meaning while remaining mysterious to themselves.
Signs of blind spots and attacks on linking include:
- Panic or somatic symptoms with no clear source
- Feeling numb or emotionally distant
- Confusing or contradictory stories about your life
- Repeating patterns you “can’t make sense of”
- Feeling like your emotions don’t match your experiences
It’s the marriage that slowly implodes because one partner keeps saying, “I’m fine,” while their body screams otherwise.
It’s the adult who still can’t feel safe in love, because their nervous system equates vulnerability with collapse.
It’s the child who became so attuned to everyone else’s chaos that they never figured out what they needed—until their body shut down in their thirties.
It’s the woman who kept picking emotionally distant partners until she realized she was the one keeping distance.
It’s the man who succeeded in every job but couldn’t feel a thing when his son hugged him.
This is how blind spots become entire realities. You end up building a life around what you can’t see, can’t feel, and can’t name. Not because you’re broken—but because somewhere along the line, the cost of seeing clearly felt too high.
And maybe that’s the most confronting part:
You can’t heal what you’ve edited out of your story.
You can’t grow from what your psyche refuses to name.
So the question becomes:
What have you been trained not to notice?
And what might change if you saw it now?
These signs don’t mean something is wrong with you. They mean your system learned not to link—because linking once felt like danger.
Healing: Restoring the Links
Healing doesn’t begin with force. It begins with gentle awareness—not to fix, but to see and embody the self.
First, we start noticing what we couldn’t notice before: tension in the chest, a moment of dissociation, the urge to deflect. Then, we begin naming what arises: “I think I’m scared.” “I don’t know why I’m angry, but I am.”
Over time, blind spots become seen. The links reconnect.
This might involve:
- Safe relationships that allow vulnerability
- Therapy that holds and reflects emotional truth
- Somatic practices that reconnect body and mind
- Meaning-making processes like writing or spiritual inquiry
Linking isn’t about solving—it’s about integrating. It’s about allowing the parts of you that were cut off to return. Slowly, gently, fully.
Final Thoughts
What you couldn’t see then was protecting you. But what you choose to see now is what will set you free.
Blind spots and attacks on linking aren’t failures—they’re intelligent defenses. They were the psyche’s way of protecting us from what felt unbearable. What once felt unbearable may now be ready to re-enter your awareness—because your system is stronger than it used to be.
Healing doesn’t mean tearing down the defenses all at once. It means approaching the edges of what’s been hidden with enough safety, enough presence, to let it unfold. It’s not about forcing awareness—it’s about creating the conditions where insight can return naturally. Where what was split can start to rejoin.
Restoring those internal links is how we begin to digest what was never fully processed. It’s how we move from reaction to reflection, from repetition to meaning. This is what allows us to reclaim not just our story, but our ability to respond, to feel, to know ourselves in full.
Because wholeness isn’t about never breaking. It’s about knowing how to come back.
And maybe, in the process, discovering that what we thought would destroy us was actually pointing us toward the self we were always meant to become.
Sources
- Bion, W.R. (1959). Attacks on Linking. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 40(5), 308–315.
- Freud, S. (1927). Fetishism. In Standard Edition (Vol. 21, pp. 147–157).
- Jung, C.G. (1959). Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self.
- Mund, M., & Mitte, K. (2012). The Costs of Repression. Health Psychology, 31(5), 640–649.
- van der Kolk, B. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score. Viking.