FEAR OF BREAKDOWN

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 opinionthat a study of this limited area leads to a restatement of several other problems that puzde 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.