ABSTRACT
D. W. Winnicott’s main theme is that the clinical fear of breakdown is fear of a breakdown that has already been experienced. It is fear of that original agony that has caused the defensive organization that the patient manifests in the form of a syndrome of illness. In practice, the difficulty lies in the fact that the patient fears the terrifying nature of the void and will organize, in order to defend himself, a controlled void, for example, by not eating, or by refusing to learn, or again he will constantly fill himself in compulsive bulimia. Thus the patient was not mature enough to experience the sense of annihilation: a schema had developed in which continuity of being was interrupted by the patient’s infantile reactions to impingement, that is to say, to factors coming from the environment, which the patient, because of her weaknesses, allowed to intrude into her development.
