Anybody know the British psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott? D.W. Winnicott? He has this incredible

paper called Fear of a Breakdown, which describes the strange temporality of mental disintegration.

He writes, the fear of breakdown is often the fear of a breakdown that has already been

experienced. So think about that. Winnicott writes, there are moments when a patient needs to be told that the breakdown,

a fear of which destroys his or her life, has already been.

It is a fact that is carried around hidden away in the unconscious.

So what Winnecon is speculating here is that the thing we fear most,

the psychic disaster that would be our undoing,

that would render us incapable of love,

work, or care, belongs to the past. It has already happened to us. We are living in its wreckage.

We just can't see it. And so fearful are we of its destructive consequences. We displace the catacly

into the near future. The disaster is perennially about to happen,

rendering us all the more incapable of addressing its causes and consequences of putting ourselves

back together. Our ego experiences this displacement as a protective self-cure, but it is actually

a form of self-imprisoning stasis and self-sabotage. Friend of the show, architecture critic Kate Wagner, in a recent blog post, she described our

psychosocial present in precisely these terms. I'm going to quote from Kate here, she says,

in the here and now, we are waiting continuously for the other shoe to drop, for the thing we haven't

experienced yet, which we envision

as a kind of singular cataclysmic event.

Even though we are literally experiencing it right now.

In reality, wars are escalating, the threat of famine grows, elections are being undermined,

and yet here we are searching for signs of breakdown in the near future, thinking that

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