Fear of Breakdown & Feeling of Emptiness

Martin Barre, Misplaced Objects

Ι 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 need 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.

In some patients emptiness needs to be experienced, and this emptiness belongs to the past, to the time before the degree of maturity had made it possible for emptiness to be experienced.

To understand this it is necessary to think not of trauma but of nothing happening when something might profitably have happened. It is easier for a patient to remember trauma than to remember nothing happening when it might have happened. At the time the patient did not know what might have happened, and so could not experience anything except to note that something might have been. 

[…] Now, emptiness is a prerequisite for eagerness to gather in. Primary emptiness simply means: before starting to fill up. A considerable maturity is needed for this stat to be meaningful. Emptiness occurring in the treatment is a state that the patient is trying to experience, a past state that cannot be remembered except by being experienced for the first time now. 
 

In practice the difficulty is that the patient fears the awfulness of emptiness and in defence will organize a controlled emptiness by not eating or learning or else will ruthlessly fill up by a greediness which is compulsive and which feel mad. When the patient can reach to emptiness itself and tolerate this state because of dependence on the auxiliary ego of the analyst, then, taking in can start up as pleasurable function; here can begin eating that is not a function dissociated (or split off) as part of the personality; also it is in this way that some of our patients who cannot learn can begin to learn pleasurably. 
 

The basis of all learning (as well as of eating) is emptiness. But if emptiness was not experienced as such at the beginning, then it turns up as a state that is feared, yet compulsively sought after. 

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