In-the-world of Winnicott’s “Fear of Breakdown”
“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.”
This is how Winnicott qualifies his preliminary statement in his 1974 paper “Fear of Breakdown”, an analysis of a certain kind of defense that enters into the therapeutic condition and what our responsibilities might be in addressing that defensive structure. I think we could just as safely include philosophers among the ranks of those who know something about the experience of repetition Winnicott lays out in this succinct 6-page paper, which though brief is characteristically dense and worth multiple reads. I think it also accounts for the poetics in Winnicott’s title, stripped of any definite article, so that we are not talking about “a” fear of breakdown or “the” fear of breakdown, but are launched straight into the orbital velocity of the experience of fear itself, shifting the experience from being in the position of something known to something felt, a clever turn that I suspect is intentional to how Winnicott hoped to introduce the concept. It also disorganizes and undermines our sense of time, in as much as titling the article “The Fear of Breakdown” would have us already situated in some point after the discovery and looking back upon it. In an article that is primarily about time’s being an experientially untidy phenomenon, it feels appropriate that we approach this space via a title that seems intent on coming to it from the experience itself. Winnicott discards the academic formality of suggesting we are beyond something looking back into it. “Fear of Breakdown”. We are already there.
And all that preamble is just what one can get by looking closely at the title. The primary “argument” of the paper is that the fear of breakdown a client can experience in therapeutic work is fear of a breakdown that has already been both experienced and not experienced by the client. Winnicott identifies the breakdown by saying that it is a breakdown that has already happened, but this is clearly meant as an objective statement of fact more so than a comment on the subjective nature of the experience itself as he quickly makes clear. A unification of sorts between Freud’s “trace of a memory” and the idea of “après coup”, Winnicott is speaking of some experience that gets warded off because of the intensity of the implication of what it would mean for the individual to have actually experienced it. In a passage that suggests a rich phenomenological apprehension of the structure, and which is worth quoting in full, Winnicott asserts:
“The patient needs to 'remember' this but it is not possible to remember something that has not yet happened, and this thing of the past has not happened yet because the patient was not there for it to happen to. The only way to 'remember' in this case is for the patient to experience this past thing for the first time in the present, that is to say, in the transference. This past and future thing then becomes a matter of the here and now, and becomes experienced by the patient for the first time. This is the equivalent of remembering, and this outcome is the equivalent of the lifting of repression that occurs in the analysis of the psychoneurotic patient…”
Winnicott’s framing of this experience goes beyond the idea of (comparatively simple) repression. He means here something so experientially potent that the client’s only viable defense is to deny, not just the existence of some impingement or injury, but their very own existence at the moment of occurrence. To borrow from another bit of language that Winnicott is fond of, we are talking about experiences that create a discontinuity of the process of going on being of the client. Failures in holding, containing, or the progression to object-relating, basic infantile needs which create the foundation for later healthy development, become the basis for the (existential) agonies that get covered over by various defensive structures later on in life. Structures that get tangled up in that phenomenon we usually refer to (though this is not Winnicott’s language) as the repetition compulsion.
I have been thinking a lot lately about how this kind of experiential structure overlaps with Heidegger’s concepts of the present-at-hand and the ready-to-hand. In re-reading Being and Time I have been reviewing previous notations I had made in the margins and am quite skeptical of some assessments I had made during earlier efforts at reading the text. I think there is an easy reading one could make and then one that requires a bit more sophistication in understanding what these two terms mean, how they operate relationally, and how that applies to the work of therapy. I will offer the easy understanding first and then hope to show why I no longer think that understanding is quite right.
Heidegger’s two concepts are attempts at describing the ways in which Dasein is with other entities in the world. The world has equipment (that is objects for use by Dasein) and that equipment makes up the referential totality of the world in which Dasein exists. When equipment is available to Dasein as “ready-to-hand” then entities for use interpenetrate Dasein’s existence in a manner which is fluid and uninterrupted. We are not critically engaged or concernful about the structure or the nature of entities around us. Rather, we are engaged in our being-with and various ways of using them. The classic Heideggerian example is the hammer. When one finds themselves hammering, if all is going well, we are not in a constant state of understanding the hammer as some object with a handle and heavy metal structure at the end which is swung at a specific velocity to drive nails or dowels into some other structure. The hammer is simply an object for engaging in the activity of hammering. Its usefulness negates the need for circumspection and in a way becomes an extension of our being-in-the-world with other objects that are in need of hammering.
An object then becomes present-at-hand when something in the environment breaks down or disrupts the easy ready-to-handedness of our being-with that entity or equipment. Heidegger identifies some language for how to describe this process, but the important thing is recognizing the experiential shift. The break occurs when the ability of Dasein to interact without disruption with the objects of its concern becomes disordered or disorganized. If the handle of our hammer breaks or we notice that we have a hammer but are being confronted with screws, this hammer than becomes weird and an object of a different kind of consideration. This facet of the world is no longer ready-to-hand, that is something easily integrated into Dasein’s being-in-the-world, but becomes present-at-hand, which is to say something that is suddenly in-the-world in a manner which discloses and makes itself known in its un-usefulness, calling a kind of attention to the object that involves our coming into awareness of its discreet entity-ness among other entities and having to make a new kind of sense of the object and our relation to it.
The “easy” reading is that the repetition compulsion, or the kind of breakdown Winnicott is talking about here, is a dysregulating response that reveals either us or the world as a present-at-hand phenomenon. That we are most often in a mode of engaging with the world that allows for some continuity of being which manifests as a ready-to-handedness of average everyday existence. The recapitulation of interpersonal injury then elicits a breakdown which is phenomenologically present-at-hand, consistent with our analysis of what happens when our hammer can no longer hammer. The world becomes obtrusive and conspicuous in a way that elicits some complex of experience which disrupts the flow of one’s existential continuity of their conscious relation to the world and others, needing some therapeutic input or intervention to return to the state of ready-to-handedness.
However, Winnicott’s paper helps to clarify the idea that the repetition compulsion or the defense against the fear of breakdown is itself also ready-to-hand and a mode of average everyday being-in-the-world. These phenomena are part of our ongoing relationship to our thrownness, which simply stated is the inheritance of our past. Not merely the historical time and place where we grow up, it is also the language and culture we are raised into, our biology, the family we are a part of and the intergenerational baggage they carry, the specific set of lived experiences we encounter, and the way all of these categories interact to inform our capacity to deal with the ordinary traumas of everyday life. Even psychopathology itself is a structure whose thrownness is constituted by ways in which we use language to operationalize and medicalize our understanding of the human organism while reducing it to categorical structures of illness and wellness which are culturally constituted (to say nothing of the fact that I personally am also thrown into a world where the ideaological structures of philosophy and psychoanalysis are such that I can borrow on them to develop some system that understands and attempts to undermine those reductive definitions of pathology).
With this, all of our so-called baseline behaviors, as well as those which get disclosed through certain reenactments, are both phenomenologically ready-to-hand. We move between various self-states or dynamic modes of existence based on the relational structures organizing our experience at any given moment, but so long as this movement is fluid and automatic, neither one could be said to be categorically of the present-at-hand. It’s such a subtle shift, but there’s a way in which I’d want to frame it as a propositional distinction, where our mode of average everydayness is a kind of ready-to-hand way of being, while that which we normally would identify as the more intense recapitulations or reenactments of the repetition compulsion are ready-at-hand, eager to be elicited when the moment calls for. The return to a kind of baseline then becomes the possible of returning to that which was ready-to-hand, but is now itself ready-at-hand as we encounter and work through the repetition, which itself has now become the ready-to-hand in its readiness to take on the unconscious reenactment of a historical trauma.
The present-at-handedness of it all then becomes the process by which we try to bring awareness to the ways in which these shifts happen, it is the cultivation of insight, or the method by which that which was implicit becomes explicit. This need not always be in the form of a verbal interpretation on the part of the therapist, wherein we tell them what the transference is and try to forcibly move the unconscious into the conscious. The therapist’s ability to analyze and be responsive to the transference phenomena at play, to use their interpretations and impressions relationally, is itself a way of bringing the client into the present-at-hand mode by offering them something which disrupts the disruption. To bring us back to Winnicott, the problem with the fear of breakdown is that it is explicitly not disruptive, it is defensive, that is the avoidance of disruption. The fear of the breakdown preserves the prior experience as something that gets to remain repressed.
Winnicott says one other things in this paper that is worth highlighting, which is that working within this phenomenon requires not just recognizing the client’s fears, but also their needs (there is also some implication here that the two are related: dialectically, hermeneutically, paradoxically). How do the set of experiential phenomena we both are and are not evoking satisfy a need: a need for safety, a need for identity, a need for love? How were desires indulged and how were they dismissed? And what did these experiences mean in the development of the self? One way to get at this, is through an analysis of the transference. Why does the client keep showing up? What are they saying is happening in the work? By what internal mechanisms did they come to pick you as a therapist in the first place? Or, if they didn’t pick you, who have you become to them? This is the ground out of which the work can begin to show itself from itself and the feared and longed for elements of the breakdown can begin to be parsed.
