The Dread of Falling by Alina Schellekes

The Dread of Falling by Alina Schellekes

The Dread of Falling: Reflections on Primitive Mental States offers a comprehensive and original view of primitive mental states from a psychoanalytic perspective, allowing the reader to understand the nature of these states from developmental, theoretical and clinical vantage points.

The book begins with a review of early mental development and its relevance to the understanding of primitive mental states. Alina Schellekes explores major primary anxieties of being and considers object relations that characterize loose or shattered structures of the self. "The dread of falling" both describes a concrete anxiety prevalent in such states and serves as a metaphor and common thread through the book to portray the deep dread of losing base with one’s meaningful objects. Schellekes looks at how, in cases of severe developmental deprivation or late-onset trauma, mental void structures or states of emotional indigestible excess may evolve, creating complex challenges in the analytic process. Schellekes explores various mental survival tactics that are often developed and deployed by patients finding themselves in such extreme cases: omnipotent self-holding defences, autistic manoeuvers, rebirth fantasies and excessive daydreaming. She discusses the quality of analytic presence that is necessary when facing unrepresented mental layers and uncentered states of mind, so as to minimize the risk of toxic states in analysis and of premature terminations.

Including perceptive analyses of literary and fine art works, the book invites the reader on an intellectual and emotional journey through complex mental landscapes of patient and analyst, encompassing profound theoretical understandings and subtle clinical observations.

"This is an inspiring bookAlina Schellekes’s beautifully rendered case histories concern patients whose symptoms range from hypochondriasis to self-destroying perfectionism to sex addiction, from eating disorders to a sense of inauthenticity or a lack of meaning. In these adults with autistic enclaves and defenses, she documents the prime importance of primitive anxieties, of holes, voids or catastrophic absences in the fabric of the personality, even while she warns against becoming fascinated by these lest the patient’s more developed aspects be overlooked. The writing is deeply personal and is enriched by links to literature, theatre and painting, as well as by wide-ranging theoretical scholarship. The book will be indispensable to psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, psychologists and to anyone interested in understanding the human mind, particularly its primitive layers."

Maria Rhode, Professor Emerita of Child Psychotherapy, Tavistock Clinic, London; member of the Association of Child Psychotherapists; child analyst of the British Psychoanalytical Society; recipient of The Frances Tustin Memorial Prize, 1998

Alina Schellekes is a Training and Supervising Psychoanalyst of the Israel Psychoanalytic Society; head of the Primitive Mental States advanced track at the Psychoanalytic Program of Psychotherapy, Tel Aviv University; chair of the Frances Tustin Memorial Trust; and recipient in 2006 of the Honorary Mention of Phyllis Meadow Award in New York for excellence in psychoanalytical writing. In 2008, she won the Frances Tustin Memorial Prize; in 2023 the IPA Hayman Prize for Published Work pertaining to Traumatized Children and Adults.