1974 Fear of Breakdown. Int. R. Psycho-Anal., 1:103-107 (IRP)
Fear of Breakdown 崩溃的恐惧
D. W. Winnicott
SUMMARY
I have attempted to show that fear of breakdown can be a fear of a past event that has not yet been experienced. The need to experience it is equivalent to a need to remember in terms of the analysis of psychoneurotics.
This idea can be applied to other allied fears, and I have mentioned the fear of death and the search for emptiness.
PRELIMINARY STATEMENT
My clinical experiences have brought me recently to a new understanding, as I believe, of the meaning of a fear of breakdown.
It is my purpose here to state as simply as possible this understanding, which is new for me and which perhaps is new for others who work in psychotherapy. Naturally, if what I say has truth in it, this will already have been dealt with by the world's poets, but the flashes of insight that come in poetry cannot absolve us from our painful task of getting step by step away from ignorance towards our goal. It is my opinion that a study of this limited area leads to a restatement of several other problems that puzzle us as we fail to do as well clinically as we would wish to do, and I shall indicate at the end what extensions of the theory I propose for discussion.
INDIVIDUAL VARIATIONS
Fear of breakdown is a feature of significance in some of our patients, but not in others. From this observation, if it be a correct one, the conclusion can be drawn that fear of breakdown is related to the individual's past experience, and to environmental vagaries. At the same time there must be expected a common denominator of the same fear, indicating the existence of universal phenomena; these indeed make it possible for everyone to know empathetically what it feels like when one of our patients shows this fear in a big way. (The same can be said, indeed, of every detail of the insane person's insanity. We all know about it, although this particular detail may not be bothering us.)
EMERGENCE OF THE SYMPTOM
Not all our patients who have this fear complain of it at the outset of a treatment. Some do; but others have their defences so well organized that it is only after a treatment has made considerable progress that the fear of breakdown comes to the fore as a dominating factor.
For instance, a patient may have various phobias and a complex organization for dealing with these phobias, so that dependence does not come quickly into the transference. At length, dependence becomes a main feature, and then the analyst's mistakes and failures become direct causes of localized phobias and so of the outbreak of fear of breakdown.
MEANING OF 'BREAKDOWN'
I have purposely used the term 'breakdown' because it is rather vague and because it could mean various things. On the whole, the word can be taken in this context to mean a failure of a defence organization. But immediately we ask: a defence against what? And this leads us to the deeper meaning of the term, since we need to use the word 'breakdown' to describe the unthinkable state of affairs that underlies the defence organization.