Why Am I Always Waiting to Fall Apart?

Fear of Breakdown is five pages long. It appeared in 1974, in the first issue of a new journal, the International Review of Psycho-Analysis, with a short note from Winnicott’s widow, Clare, explaining where it had come from. He had written it shortly before he died, she said. It was a first condensed statement of something that had surfaced out of his clinical work, and he had meant to come back and write about parts of it at greater length. Time did not allow.

The central idea fits in one sentence. The breakdown a patient is afraid of has already happened.

Winnicott spends the rest of the paper trying to make that sound less strange. It does not get much less strange.

What Winnicott meant by breakdown

In Winnicott’s usage, breakdown is not the adult collapse people picture, the job lost and the bed not left. He chose the word because it was vague. On the surface it means the failure of a defence organisation. Underneath, it means whatever the defence was organised against, and that is where the paper goes.

What lies underneath belongs to the earliest months, when an infant is absolutely dependent and has not yet separated a me from a not-me. In that period somebody else has to do the holding, and when the holding fails badly enough the infant meets states Winnicott refused to call anxiety, because the word was not strong enough. He called them primitive agonies and listed a few. Falling for ever is one. Losing the sense that anything is real is another. What turns up later in a consulting room is never the agony itself. It is the defence built against it, which he thought usually worked.

His main contention follows. Clinical fear of breakdown, he wrote, is fear of a breakdown that has already been experienced: fear of the original agony that the whole defensive organisation was built to keep off. The catastrophe the person feels coming is behind them.

He did not say this of everyone. The paper opens by noting that fear of breakdown matters in some patients and not in others, and the summary says the fear can be a fear of a past event. The hedge is his.

Why the breakdown can’t be remembered

On Winnicott’s account it was never experienced, so there is nothing there to remember. He was specific that he did not mean the repressed unconscious, the place where something known gets pushed out of sight. He meant that the ego was too immature at the time to gather the event into itself. It is not possible, he wrote, 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.”

Developmental memory research reaches something with the same outline by a different road. Adults have very few memories from their first three or four years, and the number climbs gradually until around seven. Patricia Bauer’s account puts this down to two things running together: a memory system still being built, and a faster rate of forgetting in childhood than in adulthood. Mark Howe’s review is blunter about the old psychoanalytic reading. Early childhood memories are not repressed. They were either never formed or quickly forgotten, and that holds whether the events were distressing or ordinary.

The months Winnicott is talking about sit well before the earliest memories adults report, and the reason they are missing is not a lid held down on something. On that point the memory science and the paper agree with each other, and both disagree with the version in which the earliest harm lies stored intact somewhere, waiting to be dug up.

Not remembering is a different matter from not being shaped, and some of the firmest evidence for the difference comes from people who cannot remember the thing that shaped them.

After the fall of Ceaușescu, families in the UK adopted children out of Romanian institutions where deprivation had been severe, and the English and Romanian Adoptees study followed them for two decades. Every one of the Romanian children had been placed before the age of four, inside the years adults keep very few memories from. In their twenties, those who had spent less than six months in an institution looked much like a comparison group of UK adoptees. Those who had spent longer had persistently higher rates of autism-like and attention problems into young adulthood, after years in stable adoptive homes, and the researchers described effects that all that care did not seem to reach. A fifth of the longer-deprived group had no problems at any assessment, and the cognitive impairment many had shown at six had largely gone by adulthood.

One pattern in that group looks, at first, like Winnicott’s paper told in numbers. Emotional problems were barely raised at eleven and fifteen, then rose markedly by young adulthood, as though something from before memory had waited twenty years to arrive.

A follow-up analysis tested that, and the answer was less dramatic. The route ran through the ordinary world. Early problems made work and friendship harder to hold on to in the move into adulthood, and the lost jobs and thin friendships carried the risk forward. A second route, through a stress system set early to over-react, was tested as well, and the results were inconclusive.

None of this tests Winnicott. The adoptees went through severe institutional deprivation, which is not what he was describing, and the study measured symptoms, not dread. What it establishes is narrower and firmer: what happens before a person can remember it goes on operating in their adult life, through channels that need no memory at all. Winnicott’s claim that a given adult fear is the outline of an infant catastrophe is a clinical inference from his consulting room. It is not a finding.

Why the fear points to the future

Because an event that was never experienced cannot be filed in the past. The original agony, Winnicott wrote, cannot get into the past tense until the person has lived it in the present. Until then the patient goes on looking for a detail from the past, and the looking takes the form of looking in the future. The fear is a search.

The search can be very well organised. Winnicott described analyses that went with a swing for years, each session clever and cosy, each advance broken up afterwards by the patient with a So what? He thought patient and analyst were both postponing the main issue, and he pictured an analyst playing the illness on a very long line in the hope that some trick of fate would end things first, the death of one of the pair or the money running out. The joke is aimed at his own profession.

The last pages turn the same logic on emptiness. Here he asks the reader to think of nothing happening at a time when something might usefully have happened, and he says this is harder to remember than a catastrophe, because at the time there was nothing to register except, at most, that something might have been. Emptiness that was never experienced as emptiness turns up later as a state that is dreaded and sought at once. People build a controlled version of it, by not learning, for instance, or fill up compulsively to keep it off.

In the same few pages he turns on existentialist writing, which he suggests makes a cult of existing in order to hold off a pull towards non-existence. A publication like this one reads that sentence and keeps its head down.

Thomas Ogden, rereading the paper forty years on, pushed it one step further. The person organised around the missing experience feels that parts of themselves are missing and have to be found, and what remains of the life feels mostly unlived.

Which leaves anyone who recognises the fear in an odd position. The research can say that the first years are lost to adult memory and that they keep working anyway. It cannot say whether a given dread is the outline of something that happened then or only dread, and asking the person settles nothing, because on Winnicott’s account the one witness to the event was not there for it.

FAQ

What did Winnicott mean by fear of breakdown?

In a paper published in 1974, after his death, Winnicott argued that clinical fear of breakdown can be the fear of a breakdown that has already happened, in the earliest months of life, before the infant was mature enough to experience it. Because it was never experienced, it cannot be remembered or placed in the past, so it is felt as something still to come. He said this mattered in some patients and not in others.

What are primitive agonies?

Winnicott’s name for the states an infant meets when early care fails badly enough. He said anxiety was not a strong enough word for them. His examples include falling for ever and losing the sense that anything is real. What shows up clinically, he argued, is the defence organised against these states, never the states themselves.

Is fear of breakdown about repressed memories?

No. Winnicott said explicitly that he did not mean the repressed unconscious. His claim is that the event was never experienced, so there was never a memory to push away. Memory research agrees on the narrower point: adults keep very few memories from their first years, and the loss is ordinary forgetting rather than repression, for distressing and mundane events alike.

Can early experiences you don’t remember still affect you as an adult?

Yes. In the English and Romanian Adoptees study, children who spent more than six months in severely depriving institutions, all adopted before the age of four, showed persistently higher rates of autism-like and attention problems into their twenties. Later emotional problems ran largely through ordinary routes, such as difficulty holding on to work and friendships, rather than through anything like a returning memory. None of this tests Winnicott’s specific claim.

Does being afraid of falling apart mean something happened to me as a baby?

Not necessarily, and no memory can settle it either way. Winnicott offered the idea as something that can be true in some patients, drawn from clinical work rather than measurement. Because nobody keeps memories from infancy, there is no recollection to check a fear against.