ABSTRACT
This chapter illustrates fundamental to helping a patient experience aspects of him that have been "lost" is an analytic attitude that recognizes and values the most subtle and unlikely ways in which a patient may attempt to experience for the first time unlived events of the past. "Fear of breakdown", written in the last year of Winnicott's life and published three years after his death, his last major work. Winnicott's "Fear of breakdown" is both an ending, in the sense of being his last major paper, and a beginning, in the sense that the paper introduces a new line of thought to be developed by others. Winnicott's writing throughout his analytic life is moving, not because he wears his heart on his sleeve. As Winnicott makes clear in "Basis for self in body", the infant may "at times disintegrate, depersonalize and even for a moment abandon the almost fundamental urge to exist and to feel existent".
