The Dread of Falling

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.

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.

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