Fear of Breakdown, Fear of Death & Suicide

Egon Schieles, Agony the Death Struggle

I content that the clinical fear of breakdown is the fear of a breakdown that has already been experienced. It is a fear of the original agony which caused the defence organisation which the patient displays as an illness syndrome

[...] the breakdown has already happend, near the beginning of the individual's life. 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.  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. 

[…] Many men and women spend their lives wondering whether to find a solution by suicide, that is sending the body to death which has already happened to the psyche.[…] Death, looked at this way as something that happened to the patient but which the patient was not mature enough to experience has the meaning of annihilation

I now understand for the first time what my schizophrenic patient (who did kill herself) meant when she said : "All I ask you to do is to help me to commit suicide for the right reason, instead of for the wrong reason." I did not succeed, and she killed herself in despair of finding the solution. Hear aim (as I now see) was to get it stated by me that she died in early infancy. On this basis I think she and I could have enabled her to put off body death till old age took it toll.   

Winnicott, D. W. (1974). Fear of breakdown. International Review of Psychoanalysis, 1, 103-107.