by Rebecca Deibert, M.A.

HOW DO I PUT THIS?

It’s not metaphor that bees make honey of themselves
while language only dreams the hunted thing.
- Maya Popa, Wound is the Origin of Wonder (2022)

We ping pong words to each other in an attempt to find something adequate—something to describe the predicament she’s in, something of substance, reality, stuff. 

Stuff, really. Really, reality. I scream internally. She groans externally. 

Why can’t we settle on a word? We exchange brief flashes of what she’d later describe as self-induced frustration and both begin laughing. Neither of us can think of the word that fits quite right. Maybe there isn’t one. Maybe that’s the point. She chooses a word that, for her, at that moment, is just okay. I follow suit and we continue the work. 

In re-reading Fear of Breakdown (1974), I wonder how much it has to do with ‘having’ language versus not having it. Is this the tailspin of breakdown—the inability to find the word and cough it up before swallowing? Winnicott, after all, lists our supposed primitive agonies with their respective defenses but doesn’t elaborate on them (because how can you, really? It’s falling forever). Ogden (2014) presumes Winnicott leaves the reader room to write, fill in, think, create, make it one’s own. This is safe but doesn’t get at the idea of language itself as tragic and failing. In sessions we settle for language even though it doesn’t take us very far. In terms of psychological catastrophe, or breakdown, I get the sense that ‘having’ the words misses the point completely. We might not have any at all.

Here are three versions. One is nonsensical, puzzling, like the experience with my patient. Words disappear or go missing. This gap lends itself to obsessiveness and misunderstanding. Once frustration sets in, the logic of the word becomes meaningless and yet the most meaningful thing of all. A second version occurs amidst awe or the uncanny, as in Freud’s (1936) experience of derealization whilst standing on the Acropolis with his brother: “...the whole psychical situation, which seems so confused and is so difficult to describe, can be satisfactorily cleared up by assuming that at the time I had (or might have had) a momentary feeling: ‘What I see here is not real’” (p. 244). Here, reality is sacrificed for description, or description sacrificed for the sake of unreality. A third is a turn toward traumatic terror, something language struggles to contain. I recently read Daniel James Brown’s (2009) The Indifferent Stars Above, which tells the harrowing story of the 1846 Donner Party marooned in the snowy Sierra Nevada. After chronicling the event’s horrors, Brown admits that language falls short: There are no words to describe eating one's family to survive.

Unlike the bee and its belly full of nectar, language points at experience without ever becoming it. What withstands breakdown, then, isn’t the right word; it’s what happens when neither person finds it, but both stick around anyway.