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For Winnicott, the fear of breakdown can be traced to the breakdown that already took place in infancy, when no mental capacities were present to experience it consciously. The past breakdown, Winnicott tells us, is projected into the future because the ego cannot yet “gather it into its own present time experience” (Winnicott, 1974, p. 105). The person then lives in fear of a breakdown that has already occurred, but which he did not experience (Ogden, 2014).
I would like to take this opportunity to reflect on my patients’ fears of breakdown on the eve of the October 7th massacre and Israel’s subsequent war of annihilation against Gaza, and on my immense subjective difficulty, as a Russian-born therapist who had already lived through a dissolution of a state (Soviet Union), sitting with these fears, through the lens of Winnicott’s ingenious formulation. In the activist communities, I belong to in Israel, the belief was long held that things would need to get worse before they got better: the problematic foundations on which the state of Israel had been built would need to come undone before the positive change we believed in and were working for – a shared society in which Palestinians and Israeli Jews would have equal rights and freedoms – could come about. Unlike the non-activists, we did expect the state to come crumbling down at some point and did not reject that process on a conceptual level. We anticipated the breakdown of the structures, so to speak – but that does not mean that we had the capacity to contain the primary dread that would accompany that process. So, I was not fully shocked when October 7th happened, nor did I – and in that my perspective differed from that of many of my patients – want things to go back to how they looked on October 6th. But that did not ease my horror and pain at the sight of the unbearable atrocities on both sides.
My not being shocked made me a very bad Israeli. The social norm that coalesced very quickly following October 7t