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During the ebulliently optimistic heyday of the popularization and the spread of psychoanalytic treatment through the educated strata of American society in the 1950s and 1960s, the typical promise and expectation was of the thorough cure of one's mental and emotional distress. In Leo Stone's widely read 1954 paper on The widening scope of indications for psychoanalysis, he wryly noted that: “Hopeless or grave reality situations, lack of talent or ability (usually regarded as ‘inhibition’), lack of an adequate philosophy of life, and almost any chronic physical illness may be brought to psychoanalysis for cure” (Stone, 1954, p. 568).
What was noted far less frequently was the unsettling awareness that such success did not, in reality, crown our efforts so uniformly, that there was a dark underbelly of significant treatment failures, or, as Arnold Goldberg states in this new book, The Analysis of Failure, a softening of such unhappy awareness by talking of less conclusive failures - impasses or stalemates. One of the few early considerations of these unhappier outcomes within American ranks was a 1964 panel at the annual meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association on the ‘limitations of psychoanalysis’ (Gray, 1965). Although limitations are not quite the same as failures, I grappled with these same problems in my opening paper on the goals of psychoanalysis, goals against which its limitations would be measured by the other panel participants (Wallerstein, 1965).
Today this dynamic of a lack of awareness of failure has been refuted very substantially, and it is no surprise that Goldberg essays a forthright look at treatment failure, based, in this instance, on a seminar on failed cases that he chaired at the Institute for Psychoanalysis of Chicago. Goldberg starts by declaring failure to, of course, be an ambiguous and problematic concept. What, after all, indubitably constitutes failure? Here is where the declared locutions for pending failures can be called im