ABSTRACT
This article examines the desire to go on being and the fear of ceasing: their nature, their origins and the unconsciously driven behaviours meant to cope with them. The author draws from Klein, Winnicott, Bion, Bick, Symington and others, as well as from ancient Buddhist Pāli texts and concepts, forming an integrative perspective on the phenomena of fear of annihilation and the self's attempts to cope with it and to go on being. She offers a vignette that demonstrates how consistent mental movement may function as a self-holding, second-skin mechanism, and suggests how the connective and projective properties of our mind create an illusion of a solid, continuous self. She points out some paradoxes, such as that the self needs to feel held in order to let go, to acknowledge its impermanence and dependency in order to become integrated, and to be integrative and collected in order to face its disintegrating, essenceless nature.
