1st Edition
The Dread of Falling Reflections on Primitive Mental States
1. Early emotional development and primitive mental states: A brief perspective 2. The dread of falling and dissolving 3. When time stood still: Thoughts about time in primitive mental states 4. Arid mental landscapes and avid cravings for human contact: Beckettian and analytic narratives on psychic void and its vicissitudes 5. Daydreaming and hypochondria: When daydreaming goes wrong and hypochondria becomes an autistic retreat 6. Sentenced to life: Reflections on trauma and the inability to bear vitality, following the movie Turtles Can Fly 7. Stations along the via dolorosa of good enough endings Concluding notes: Bone-building interpretations
Biography
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.
"This is an inspiring book. Alina 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
