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Donald Winnicott's last paper, “The Fear of Breakdown” (1974), proposes a radical concept of anticipating with fear something that is already past. I will draw a link of reasoning between Winnicott's fear of a breakdown that has already occurred to the present-day phenomenon of FOMO — “the fear of missing out” that is prominent, though not exclusively, in adolescents and young adults. I propose that sometimes a person lives as though what is missing is currently being missed, rather than something absent and missing earlier in his life. The search for something in one's present and future is thus linked with the experience of parts of oneself being absent or unavailable as well as experiences of nurturance, responsivity, and emotional containment having been absent, lost, or inadequate early in life.
What I describe in this paper is a phenomenon I've witnessed in many clinical situations, one that is common and, I am certain, not unique to my experience. Patients arrive at the consulting room often expressing a FOMO and an inability to find something that remains unnamable or ambiguous, the thing that is out of reach, but that needs desperately to be found. The search in the patient's mind and in external life feels pressured and without end. This agonizing search is often compounded by social media, which can provoke painful states of envy through the daily onslaught of online images and profiles of seemingly engaged, happy, partnered-up people, images that often suggest that everyone else has somehow found this mysterious thing that is still being sought by the patient.
The patient cannot consider the thing that has already been missed, and so the endless pursuit of an activity, or a social experience — as well as questions such as where to live, with whom to partner, which school to attend — are inevitably accompanied by feelings of discontent, uncertainty, restlessness, depression, and doubt. Choices are eventually made but a dreadful feeling of dissatisfaction an