ABSTRACT
In Donald Winnicott's posthumously published paper "Fear of breakdown", he explores a phenomenon with which he has been challenged in his adult practice as a psychoanalyst; that is, the fear that some patients experience, of breaking down in their analytic treatment. The purpose of the state of mind into which the new mother enters in primary maternal preoccupation, is to provide "a setting for the infant's constitution to begin to make itself evident, for the developmental tendencies to start to unfold, and for the infant to experience spontaneous movement and become the owner of the sensations that are appropriate to this early phase of life". Following Winnicott, in the earliest postnatal period the baby is most vulnerable to impingement and thus to the most profound of anxieties that follow: primitive agonies of annihilation anxiety, falling forever. Francis became a very distressed baby whose cries frequently filled the unit. He was often inconsolable.
