Fear of Breakdown

An essay by D.W. Winnicott.

“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.” (103)

Psychoanalytic explanations here are treated as elaborations of poetic insights. I’m reminded by Wittgenstein’s remarks on philosophy as a kind of disenchantment, but in this case we’re not trying to dispel what we’re examining so much as unpack or dissect without destroying it.

Backlinks

The following pages link to this page:

• Mourning Diary
• The Clinical Thinking of Wilfred Bion