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We are living in breakdown times. What is new, exciting, and terrifying is the growing evidence that, on a collective scale, we are no longer merely plagued by our fears of breakdown: we are actually courting breakdown. Take, for example, a recent NYT Siena college poll which reveals that 70% of those polled, across both political parties, either want major change to the U.S. economic and political system or want to tear the system down altogether (Barbaro, 2024). Can we, then, speak of “breakdown desire,” and not only “breakdown fear,” as a collective political force? And what of our clinical responsibility (Gentile, 2023) to cultivate disruption (a form of breakdown) as integral to therapeutic action in our practices?
If breakdown fears and desires—across both the clinical and political realms—increasingly preoccupy our patients, ourselves, and psychoanalysis itself, then we have an opportunity as clinicians to stay curious and engage with them. Meandering with Winnicott, might we play with his themes, placing them perhaps in a novel arrangement: breakdown, object use, survival, and possibly revival of the Mother? Let’s try.
As I’ve previously argued, the constellation of recent political turbulence, continued assaults on democracy and the planet, global racialized uprisings, and the pandemic not only exhausted us and splintered the fabric of daily life, producing enormous psychic and material tolls, most especially for already oppressed subjects, it also enlisted us—en masse—into something of a collective psychoanalytic journey (Gentile, 2020). By means of destabilizing temporalities, novel paradoxes, and uncanny phenomena, we alternately, or at the same time, sharpened our psychic conditioning, sovereignty, and discernment and potentiated a vulnerability to omnipotent self-capture and fascistic states of mind. A marked political chasm has deepened, catalyzing wildly disparate political visions, ranging from dire and antidemocratic to radically inclusive and equali