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Success and failure in analysis are concepts that by their very nature are elusive and difficult to pin down. They can be thought about only in relation to implicit or explicit goals, which patient and analyst may or may not share. They rely on some concept of what is normative, which is socially determined and in continual flux. Success and failure are both present in most if not all analyses, and in some important way they mutually define and contextualize each other.
Analysts have a difficult time tolerating failure in their work, and find complicated ways of denying it, disguising it, and assigning it elsewhere. This is often the case even when toleration and exploration of failure in the transference-countertransference is essential to the analytic work with certain patients. Moreover, analysts have difficulty avoiding moral judgments of themselves or others regarding failure, which interferes with its more thoughtful and dispassionate analysis. This is particularly unfortunate in that failure is often a springboard for novel and creative contributions to clinical work and theory, as is exemplified in the work of Freud and many other analysts. Because of the elusiveness and formidable difficulty of the topic, an essay attempting to “analyze” failure will itself both exemplify failure and provide impetus for further thinking.
These are the central arguments to which Arnold Goldberg returns again and again in The Analysis of Failure. The book arises in part from a study group he organized consisting of analysts and therapists who were willing to present and discuss their “failed” cases. The scare quotes are meant to indicate that there was often a lack of consensus on whether or not, or in what ways, the presented cases had in fact failed. Some of the book's many brief clinical vignettes come from this study group; others are from the author's extensive experience as a psychoanalytic clinician. The volume is not at all a casebook, however, in that the vignettes are