fear of breakdown

a psychopolitical theory

from Gustav Doré’s illustrations of Dante’s Inferno

One of the most upsetting realities of everyday life is that we are psychically incapable of comprehending the state of the world we live in. Every day, we — by which I mean all of humanity, though of course these feelings are felt more acutely in Gaza than they are in Finland — are forced against our will to observe life as we once knew it come to an end. If one so much as mentions this reality — even in the most benign way, such as by saying that the world of one’s own childhood is no longer in any way reclaimable — one will be met with an urgent mix of denial and chastisement simply because both are better than the alternative.

It seems as though only when we list out all that is happening around us, can we, for a moment, summon the vertiginous feelings of overwhelm and dread we seemingly do everything in our power to suppress. Three years of a genocide transpiring in plain sight — one by which we increasingly scroll with the flick of a thumb; a new, stupid and brutal war whose consequences include an impending economic and energy crisis unlike anything the world has ever seen before; the accelerating destruction of the planet; the dismantling or elimination of the institutions that protect and enrich us; the wanton targeting of things that many of us love — the earth, the birds, learning, reading, the arts, one another; an emerging global consensus in which children are increasingly viewed as disposable, the terrifying erosion of the rights of women, trans people, immigrants, the mentally ill, the poor, and the persecution of those on the Left — I can name more, but there is no point, save for perpetuating this mounting discomfort. To consider even a single one of these elements in its entirety is already too much for the ordinary mind to to bear, and yet we are asked to bear all of them simultaneously every single day.

Because we members of Western society are not socially permitted to express despair in everyday life, we are more often than not forced into a kind of cruel and unsustainable quiescence. We learn as children that the suppression of our emotions is integral to social equilibrium within the family, something which is then extrapolated onto public life at the high, high cost of the subconscious belief that our emotional needs do not ultimately matter beyond ourselves. The despair of others frightens us in part because it forces us to reckon with that same bargain. What makes you so special? What gives you the right to cry?

This relationship to empathy has only become more fraught in the internet age, especially so in our post-lockdown era, during which the complete interiorization of everyday life has resulted in both a further burrowing of despair and an increased disavowal of social participation writ large. To cry in public ten years ago would have elicited the sympathy of others, an “Are you alright?” from the other side of the bathroom stall. But our alienation from one another has progressed to such an extent that strong emotions are increasingly viewed not as a pity nor as a sympathetic reminder of our own capacity for feeling, but as a threat — as performative, as unsafe, as suspicious. You are not allowed to feel the full brunt of your emotions — after all, today’s a work day — but, at the same time, neither is anyone else. Even worse, we often decry visible emotional expression using the language of productivity, of wasted time and energy, one of many small tyrannies we borrow from the capitalist lexicon.

Such repression has profound effects on us both personally and politically. Because it is so disorienting to watch the fall of imperial rule take place in real time, with far more ease and rapidity than one would expect, we are often forced to ask, like children: What is happening? A more common, despairing refrain is: Why isn’t anyone doing anything to stop this? This, of course, is both a simple and complicated question. First of all, many ordinary people — from parents to journalists to protestors — are putting their lives on the line to stop this, and one’s own despair (and one’s own guilt about one’s despair) shouldn’t cheapen these efforts.

Often the “anyone” in “why isn’t anyone doing anything to stop this” means “the people in power.” But here, the answer is less psychological and more material: The people in power have more in common with each other than they do with all of us, and will do anything they can to maintain their class interests at a time many members of the elite — especially those in the tech world — increasingly see as an endgame scenario. Put simply, they want this to happen. They believe (falsely) they can make it out of the world that’s emerging unscathed. They’re shorting oil futures every Friday while the rest of the world plunges into chaos.

Yet just as often, the “anyone” we’re making an appeal to is ourselves. Why aren’t I — why aren’t we — doing anything to stop this? There are some obvious answers to this question as well, ones that are for others to discuss — burnout, fear of state repression, the expansion of surveillance, technological capture, the weakness of both left and liberal coalitions and the sad state of mass politics. All that being said, there is also something transpiring within us as psychic beings that is more difficult to describe, to blame on the structural, on the external.

To make an attempt at describing this psychical state, we must, of course, borrow from psychoanalytic thought. Because such texts only truly describe the small universe unfolding between analyst and analysand, their use beyond analysis runs the risk of bastardization or the bringing of its concepts into the sphere of metaphor. However, these risks aside, I have yet to find a better model for the sense of paralysis so prevalent in the contemporary political moment.

This is not meant to depoliticize the task at hand, but rather try to understand something politics alone cannot — why so many of us are so unable to do something politically productive with our fear, why we write about unfolding events in a strange tense as though what has transpired could still, through the protestation of the writer be changed¹, why we seek anesthetization (digital or otherwise) wherever we can and yet denounce this very same practice.

Back when I was trying to get a grip on the psychical elements of my chronic illness (of which there were many) I was introduced by an online acquaintance to a paper by the British psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott titled “Fear of Breakdown,” with which I have been obsessed ever since. Because this paper mostly describes complications arising from the developmental processes of becoming — the integration of the psyche from birth, or, alternatively the phenomenon of “impingement” in which environmental factors disrupt the infant’s process of development or “going-on-being” resulting in corrective measures that can lead to a fractured or incomplete sense of self — one must play very fast and loose with how its key concept can be projected beyond these developmental constraints.

In “Fear of Breakdown,” the so-feared breakdown is just that: a form of disintegration, a life lived in terror of what Winnicott called the “unthinkable state of affairs that underlies the defense organization.” That unthinkable state of affairs is the primordial soup of becoming that we don’t remember, such as the process of recognizing that we are separate or differentiated from the external world, or the gradual integration of mind and self within our own bodies. He adds (in typical parlance): “The ego organizes defenses against breakdown of the ego organization, and it is the ego organization that is threatened. But the ego cannot organize against environmental failure in so far as dependence is a living fact…”

That last sentence but the ego cannot organize against environmental failure in so far as dependence is a living fact refers to the environmental failures (parental crisis, household dynamics, etc.) surrounding the infant in its state of absolute dependence (that is, before it is able to distinguish that it is a “me” separate from others.) However, it does not take much effort to expand that notion into our own world, the world of adults. How we ourselves have been developed through the psychosocial bonds of infancy and childhood and beyond (or how we have developed ourselves) creates for us an internal structure, an order of stability through which we must relate to the world and the things in it. But these structures of organization are no match for a world in crisis simply because we are also dependent on that world.

Breakdowns are, literally speaking, mental breakdowns, which, in their basest states are ways of unbecoming. Winnicott lists these as “primitive agonies” and they involve things like “a return to a disintegrated state” (whose defense is disintegration); “falling forever” (whose defense is self-holding); loss of psychosomatic collusion or indwelling (i.e. a cleavage between mind and body whose defense is depersonalization); loss of reality (whose defense is “primitive narcissism” — a self-centeredness that disguises a lack of differentiation between the ego and the world); and loss of capacity to relate to objects (whose defense lies in relating only to self-phenomena.)

There is an obvious corollary between the individualized unmaking of the self in breakdown and the broader social breakdowns which we are now experiencing and to which we react in not dissimilar ways. We are fearing the collapse of the world order as we know it. We are in political freefall. We have, through layers of objectifying and alienating technology, lost touch with ourselves as somatic beings with inner lives transpiring in concrete space. We feel frequently unmoored from reality, the world in which we grew up, the world we knew just a handful of years ago. Our inability to relate to each other indeed drives us into maladaptive states of obsession, all of which further the construction of what can only be described as fortresses of the self, boundaries between our inner and outer worlds that keep the former safe from siege.

But the terrifying key to the fear of breakdown thesis is this: “The fear of breakdown is the fear of a breakdown that has already been experienced.” Winnicott writes: “There are moments, according to my experience, when a patient needs to be told that the breakdown, a fear of which destroys his or her life, has already been. It is a fact that is carried round hidden away in the unconscious.” His concept of the unconscious here has a specific meaning: “…that the ego integration is not able to encompass something. The ego is too immature to gather all the phenomena into the area of personal omnipotence.” In other words, this unconscious is where we bury the unfathomable, that which we are neither able nor prepared to comprehend. This inability to bring our greatest fear, the fear of our unmaking, under our control renders us very helpless. It keeps us in the fear of breakdown.

This begs the question: why are we worried by these things that, albeit unconscious, belong to the past? Winnicott’s answer is a strange phenomenological construct in which these agonies of breakdown cannot “get into the past tense” unless they can be fully experienced in the here and now. “In other words,” he writes, “the patient must go on looking for the past detail which is not yet experienced. This search takes the form of a looking for this detail in the future.”

What we have here, then, is a dialectical temporality that, while complex, is not unfamiliar to most of us. We are afraid of something that has already happened. We don’t know what that something is because we haven’t experienced it in the here and now. We can only know what it is when we discover it in the future, which is where we are looking for it. This manifests clinically in a number of ways. Winnicott cites the suicidal patient who fears dying because they do not realize they are already psychically dead, or the patient who fears emptiness and as such can neither eat nor learn in anticipation of this emptiness, and thus who is already empty. Another example could be the hypochondriac who does not realize that they are already sick, that they have fallen ill quite some time ago.

However, although Winnicott (RIP) may find this crude, this mixed state of fear of breakdown is precisely how most of us are dealing with current events. The breakdown of the society in which we were born and raised has, in fact, already happened. It has happened and continues to happen by way of several concurrent historical processes from which one can cherrypick their best narratives about how precisely it all came to pass.²

Meanwhile, in the here and now, we are waiting continuously for the other shoe to drop, for the thing we haven’t experienced yet (which we envision as a kind of singular cataclysmic event, hence the popularity of disaster movies — think The Day After Tomorrow vs hurricane season each year) even though we are literally experiencing it right now. Wars are escalating, the threat of famine grows, elections are being undermined, and yet here we are searching for signs of breakdown in the near future thinking that only after they arrive on our doorstep in a neat little package will we be able to confront them, will we be able to act. This is a self-perpetuating stagnation originating from the fact that we cannot integrate the reality of the world in breakdown within our inner psychic life, which fears both that breakdown and our own.

Fear of breakdown is a kind of retrograde dialectical energy, one that vampirizes the lifeblood of the more participatory dialectic of history. In it, then, now, and tomorrow all become enmeshed within themselves and by extension stymie our singular and collective spirits. The future moves backwards into a true yet ambiguously transpired past. This stagnation is something quite different from historical progression which moves only forward via the iterative, violent collision and recombination of all things, which forms the new from what was, what is known and what is possible. These two processes are, I think, related, and, judging by the way things are going, the implications are grim.

The only way out of fear of breakdown is to bring the fear out into the open, to experience it as it is in the here and now so that it can be properly integrated by the self into the psyche. Individually speaking, this is the clinical task of the world’s psychoanalysts, but politically speaking it is our collective duty. The more we repress the reality of our situation, the more we anesthetize ourselves with self-negating technologies, the more we lie in wait for that mythical, singularly apocalyptic future, the more likely it — that which is already happening and which has already happened — will show up in the form we fear most.

I, for one, think it is our duty to despair. Instead, we do everything in our power to keep ourselves from mourning the dying and poisoned earth, the small children whose universes have been snuffed out by bombs and bulldozers, our neighbors who are being terrorized, beaten, and disappeared and our own increasingly occluded futures. We are expected to remain still, to never cry nor scream nor act out in any way, to never embrace, with the full brunt of our consciousness, both our terrible and justifiable fear and our vehement hatred for those who perpetuate it. To repress our sense of injustice, to never be allowed to dream of nor commit violence even though being forced to endure this life is a violence of its own — this is an untenable state of being.

One of Winnicott’s patients was a suicidal woman who begged him: “All I ask you to do is to help me commit suicide for the right reason instead of for the wrong reason.” He didn’t succeed and she killed herself out of despair. Only after did he realize that the best and truest solution to her problem was to inform her that she had already died psychically, that the thing she so feared had already come to pass, and, by extension that, having survived, it was something that could be moved through. We, too, are a bunch of dead men walking. The passive and active suicidality of our times is both a fear of the real and total end and evidentiary of our own internal world-death. This is undeniably devastating and we should treat it as such, should consider it for what it really is. On the other hand, if what you’re afraid of has already happened, there is, of course, nothing to lose.

1. When I wrote my piece about the White House Ballroom for the New York Review of Architecture (in which I describe the ballroom less as a sacrilege and more like an exercise in architectural power consolidation, one the left should both envy and seek understand) I was perplexingly accosted by readers who described my insufficient lack of outrage as being permissive of the thing itself, as though by condemning the act more (rather than accepting outright that it has already happened, which is essentially what I did) it would have meant something existential to the outcome of the act itself. We can mistake this as an accusation of complicity but it is something slightly different than that — it’s the idea that sufficient outrage can psychically and literally undo what has already happened, which is not possible. Once you start noticing this phenomenon you will find it everywhere.

2. Personally, I would start with Reconstruction.