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Disappointment is a universal theme in human experience. Essential to child development, which requires us to give up the infantile omnipotence that we invest in ourselves and our parents (Jacobson 1946), disappointment shadows us throughout adult life as we strive once again to satisfy unquenchable desires (Schäfer 1999). In addition to these universal losses, and often linked to them, the work of the analyst brings with it its own set of disappointments, as the analyst struggles to manage his wishes for the patient and the process within the constraints of his method (see Cooper, this issue) and as he is induced by the patient's use of projective identification to bear the patient's disappointment, either as the representative of an early object the patient wishes to disappoint or as the representative of the patient's own disappointment (Joseph 1982).
I wish to explore here a particular kind of disappointment that I have observed in in the course of doing analysis. This kind of disappointment is a soft-spoken state; it does not announce its presence sharply in my thoughts but is a kind of sad fog that settles on the process, leading me to lower my expectations for the outcome of the analysis. Of importance, this kind of disappointment has tended to reside in the analysis as a shared state, felt at the same time by both members of the dyad. Often it has been the patient who has given voice to the disappointment, and although I have explored the meaning of the patient's lament, it has been hard for me to interpret either the implied aggression or the implied sense of loss as