Last written work of the great English psychoanalyst Donald Woods Winnicott (1896-1971) shortly before his death, in which he succinctly and condensedly reminds some of his basic positions to develop the hypothesis of the fear of collapse.

Winnicott's text - apart from his inexhaustible clinical wealth - can be read as the attempt of an intellectual to speak about his work. A work in the form of a testament.
"My clinical experiences have recently led me, I believe, to a new understanding of what the fear of collapse means.
"My purpose here is to formulate this understanding as simply as possible, which is new to me and perhaps new to others working in the field of psychotherapy. Of course, if what I am saying has any truth, the poets of the world will have already dealt with it, but the flashes of insight that penetrate poetry cannot exempt us from our painful duty to move away from ignorance, approaching our goal step by step. In my opinion, a study of this limited space leads to the reformulation of several other problems that arise when we fail in our clinical practice, in what we would like to do well. Finally, I will suggest the kind of theoretical extensions I propose for discussion.
[...] "I tried to show that the fear of collapse can be the fear of a past event that has not yet been experienced as an experience. The necessity of this experience is equivalent to that of memory in the analysis of neurotics.
"This idea can be applied to other related fears, so I mentioned the fear of death and the search for emptiness."

First publication: "International Review of Psychoanalysis", 1974, 1: 103-107.