ABSTRACT
D. W. Winnicott was a psychoanalyst and paediatrician trained by Melanie Klein, one of the cofounders of object relations theory. Many of her ideas, including those about play, pre-oedipal developments, “internal” and “external” objects, and babies’ subjective experiences of their bodies, were integral to his work. Since “Fear of Breakdown” outlines what Winnicott calls “a reversal of the individual’s maturational process”. In “Fear of Breakdown”, Winnicott outlines a similar state of splitting. Like the traumatised subject in Winnicott’s model, those with Body Integrity Identity Disorder and Phantom Limb Syndrome embody a painful and incomprehensible lack. Analytic exchange and the mirror-box can be conceived of as a kind of transitional object that creates a space for individuals to experience fragmentation without feeling “dropped” or “annihilated”, allowing them to begin accepting the reality of their fracture through the illusion of its lack.
