Analytic therapy enables patients to relive and repair failures to promote their mentalization by parental figures. However, therapists also fail temporarily to provide the patients with a growth-promoting environment when their patterns of reflexivity on the patients’ experience are undermined. These temporary failures create new opportunities for therapists to access unformulated knowledge about their patients’ experiences and enrich their reflexivity on them, and for the patients to promote their ability to hold themselves in their own minds.