Failed Cases

When Arnold Goldberg decided to study treatment failure, he offered a seminar entitled “Failed Cases” at the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis. A large number of candidates, graduate analysts, and faculty quickly reworked their schedules so that they might participate. Goldberg’s reputation as a provocative, stimulating and brilliant teacher, combined with the unusual subject, encouraged a large membership. Goldberg asked Brenda Solomon and Caryle Perlman, two author participant members of the long running study group, resulting in the book Errant Selves, to help line up presenters and take notes on the seminar.

Lining up presenters was not always an easy task. Most people had mixed feelings about presenting work clearly labeled a “failed case” to a group of their peers. The candidates were perhaps more willing to expose what might be a failure on the grounds of being “just a candidate so it is not surprising I have failed doing this treatment.”

The participants of the seminar did not hold back in their myriad responses to the “failed cases.” Such responses ranged from blaming the analyst to blaming the patient, to thinking this was not a failure so no one was to blame, and finally to concluding that this analysis was so inappropriate that failure was inevitable from the start. Some presenters felt traumatized after presenting, even if they said it was useful, while others said it helped them look at the treatment in a completely different way. One said that the whole purpose of the group was a sado-masochistic enactment but she was still glad she had presented.

Goldberg never asked for Perlman’s or Solomon’s notes. Instead, he wrote the book on his own. Perhaps he did not want to deal with the enormously time-consuming process of the study group and the multiple case presentations he had lived through. Perhaps he knew this was going to be his last major work and so wanted the liberty to write it in his own eloquent style, on his own timetable, and with his own exam