In one of his last psychoanalytic papers, D.W. Winnicot wrote: Fear of breakdown is the fear of a breakdown that has already been experienced. This statement has always been a source of great comfort to me. For years I took it to mean that the other shoe has already dropped, that you’ve already been to the place you fear the most, that you’ve already come back from it.
It´s only lately that I’ve ralized that Winnicott is not suggesting that breakdowns do not recur. Now I see that he may be suggesting just the opposite: that fear of breakdow in our past may be precisely what causes it to repeat in our future.
Maggie Nelson, The Red Parts