by Amber Trotter, Psy.D.

FEAR OF A BREAKDOWN THAT HAS ALREADY HAPPENED

As an Environmental Science major in 2002, I remember thinking: “We’re fucked.” Ecological collapse, war in Iraq, erosion of the middle class and welfare state and rampant inequality, profound mistrust of science and government, defunct progressive politics, intensifying automation — and little grounds for optimism about course correction. I switched to social psychology.       

Like Jesus (“forgive them, for they know not what they do”), Marx points to the damaging effects of human ignorance (“they do not know it, but they are doing it”). As Zizek observes, however, ideology doesn’t function like a pair of sunglasses: take them off and, violà, we’re free. In our cynical era, we know very well what we are doing, but we do it anyway. What we misrecognize is why. We fail to correctly diagnose the structural and ideological forces that continually construct reality as we know it. Ideology functions not to protect us from reality, but to protect reality from its traumatic core.

The COVID crisis has exposed the breakdowns that have already happened, plunging us into the “unthinkable state of affairs that underlies the defense organization” — the terror of facing the damage already done — our failed state, disastrous healthcare system, precarious and brutal economy.

Some hope this revelation will impel change: because we can no longer deny certain facts, neoliberalism’s death blow has finally been delivered. A similar logic accompanied Trump’s 2016 election.

Winnicott, in “Fear of A Breakdown,” gives us pause. Facing the breakdown, the traumatic core, is merely re-traumatizing, a past that continuously contours the present, a living nightmare, with all its attendant defensive symptoms — absent, of course, analysis. 

Analysis affords a holding environment, a relational container that allows us to tolerate the full impact of the breakdown. It also facilitates ego function. Fear of breakdown is ultimately fear of ego-breakdown, and facing the breakdown involves a loss of self-coherence. Thus, analytic understanding in the face of breakdown requires an auxiliary ego. The analyst retains the capacity to think, helping the patient make sense of their experience until it can be integrated into their own restored ego.

At a societal level, holding and auxiliary ego function could be provided by effective leadership, formal and informal social organizations, interpersonal relationships, and so on. Such organizations and relationships would allow us to mourn, to make difficult choices, to articulate new stories.

Absent this (and Zoom and Facebook and other disembodied parasocial mediums are no substitute), we will likely prop up the reality we know, resuscitating the ideology that protects us from accurately perceiving reality’s traumatic core. Thrust face-to-face with breakdown, losing self-cohesion, we need something. So, we’ll likely herald salvation through technology and socially-responsible capitalism. We’ll scapegoat liberals, conservatives, immigrants, Trump. The woke illuminati will continue to shame the degenerate who will continue to respond with gleeful contempt.

Where does this leave us? I’m not sure. We cannot contain the uncontainable. But perhaps, in small ways, we can help with ego function. We can help people think with compassion and clarity. Amid swirling primitive anxieties and oppressive hivemind superego shouting, we can emphasize the importance of thinking in critical, expansive, creative, fundamentally embodied ways. We can emphasize the importance of genuine, containing relationships to such thinking. 

Really, I have little to offer by way of hope. But I’ll end with Winnicott: “All this is very difficult, time-consuming and painful, but it at any rate is not futile. What is futile is the alternative, and it is this that must now be examined.