Understanding and Coping with Failure: Psychoanalytic perspectives

Brent Willock, Rebecca Coleman Curtis, Lori C. Bohm, Brent Willock, Rebecca Coleman Curtis, Lori C. Bohm

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317680680
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Failure is a theme of great importance in most clinical conditions, and in everyday life, from birth until death. Its impact can be destabilizing, even disastrous. In spite of these facts, there has been no comprehensive psychoanalytic exploration of this topic. Understanding and Coping with Failure: Psychoanalytic Perspectives fills this gap by examining failure from many perspectives. It goes a long way toward increasing understanding of the numerous issues involved, and provides many valuable insights into ways of coping with these challenging experiences and several chapters discuss positive aspects of failure - what can be learned from what would otherwise simply be regrettable experiences.

Brent Willock, Rebecca Coleman Curtis and Lori C. Bohm bring together a rich diversity of topics explored in thoughtful ways by an international group of authors from the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States of America. Failed therapies (which have been examined in the literature) are but one element freshly explored in this comprehensive exploration of the topic. The book is divided into sections covering the following topics: Failing and Forgiving; Society-Wide Failure; Failure in the Family; Therapeutic Failure; Professional Failure in the Consulting Room and on the Career Path; Integrity versus Despair: Facing Failure in the Final Phase of the Life Cycle; Metaphoric Bridges and Creativity; The Long Shadow of Childhood Relational Trauma.

Understanding and Coping with Failure will be eagerly welcomed by all those trying to increase their awareness, understanding, and capacity to work with the many ramifications of this important issue. Because of the uniqueness of this broad, detailed exploration of the complexities of the failure experience, it will be essential reading for psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers, counselors, and students in these disciplines. It will also appeal to a wider audience interested in the psychoanalytic perspective.

Part I

FAILING AND FORGIVING

1

FAIL BETTER

Richard Holloway

When I was asked to write this chapter, the reason given for the invitation was a short broadcast I had done for the BBC some time before on the theme of failure. It is one thing to pull off a snappy two-minute radio talk, quite another to extend it to chapter length; but I am glad the invitation was issued not only because of the honour you have done me in inviting me, but because it has given me an opportunity to think a bit more systematically about such a profound topic. I want to begin by repeating the central thought in the broadcast referred to.

It concerned one of the greatest tragedies in the history of baseball. It occurred on October 25, 1986, when the Boston Red Sox had a comfortable two-run lead against the Mets, in what the Americans modestly call the World Series. The Mets were batting and a Red Sox veteran, Bill Buckner, was fielding at first base. Inexplicably, he let a lightly tapped ball roll between his legs into outfield, enabling the Mets to get a home run and victory. Buckner was a baseball hero who had won thousands of games for the Red Sox over the years with his line drives and brilliant fielding. All that was forgotten, and he is now famous for the day he lost the Red Sox the World Series.

This incident led Stephen Jay Gould (2002, p. 63), the great scientist and baseball fan, to observe that triumph’s pleasures are intense but brief, while failure remains with us for ever. He suggested that this was a good thing because failure expresses our common humanity. When people in public life fail in some way, as they all invariably do from time to time, fair-minded people will always forgive them, provided they admit what happened. ‘Sorry, folks, I guess I dropped the ball.’

I suspect Bill Buckner would have found little comfort in Gould’s dismissal of what to him was an enduring shame. Gould was right to say failure expresses our humanity, but why do we so often associate it with shame? And why are we so anxious to hide our failures? Why is failure such a toxic word? All I can do in this short chapter is offer a few preliminary thoughts – three themes on the topic – each followed by a suggestion.

First theme: why this fear of failure?

One of the most interesting books I have read on this or any other subject is Norman F. Dixon’s (1988) On the Psychology of Military Incompetence. Dixon was fascinated by those snafus or cock-ups that riddle military history at all times, in all places. Before seeking an explanation for the failures, he offered many examples. Here are two of them (pp. 36ff., 112).

In 1854, during the Crimean War, Lord Raglan ordered a cavalry regiment, the Light Brigade, to charge the Russian cannons. Tennyson’s famous poem described what happened.

Forward the Light Brigade!

Was there a man dismay’d

Not though the soldiers knew

Someone had blundered:

Theirs not to make reply,

Theirs not to reason why,

Theirs but to do and die:

Into the Valley of Death

Rode the six hundred.

Of the 673 cavalrymen who charged the Russian guns, 100 rode back.

In 1893, the Royal Navy was on manoeuvres in the South Atlantic with the elderly, short-sighted Admiral Tryon in charge. He ordered two parallel columns of battleships to reverse direction by turning inwards. The other officers on the brig could see that the combined turning circle required for the manoeuvre was greater than the actual distance between the ships, but they dared not question the order. HMS Camperdown rammed HMS Victoria with great loss of life.

At the risk of greatly oversimplifying his thesis, Dixon discovered that at the heart of all the examples of military incompetence he explored there was a human type he called the authoritarian personality. It had four characteristics, the fourth being the really significant one.

1 There was an anal-retentive neatness and fear of mess and confusion in this type of person. They craved an ordered universe and ran their lives on the fixed tramlines of duty and routine.

2 They were emotionally frigid and afraid to let go of control.

3 They were deferential to those above them in the pecking order and contemptuous of those below. It could be said of them what was said of a recent US Ambassador to the UN: he kissed up and kicked down.

4 The most powerful motive in the authoritarian personality was fear of failure. Keeping out of trouble was more important than any hope of success. Everything was done by the book. When the book did not have the answer to a particular situation, they were incapable of improvising.

Dixon said the authoritarian personality was the result of conditional loving in childhood. Potty-training was the metaphor he used. Approval was only achieved and affection experienced if the child performed on time and into the appropriate vessel. This created a personality for whom keeping out of trouble and doing everything by the book were their dominant purposes. Fear of failure became their main motive.

First consequential suggestion

At the root of our fear of failure lies belief in an implicit or explicit metaphysic of surveillance. For me, this metaphysic is symbolically expressed in a Victorian wall plate a friend mischievously left me in his will. It shows a large, staring eye, with this motto underneath: ‘Thou God see’st me’. For the person living under this threat, life is not an experiment in being, a process of discovery; it is a search for approval through avoidance of what is disapproved of. You may well ask why on the scales of judgement a single feather of failure can psychologically outweigh a prodigious record of achievement, but this is the mindset created by the surveillance metaphysic. It is also why a prohibitionist ethics of avoidance is more stultifying to our humanity than an ethics of excellence and achievement. Excellence and achievement are the result of the constant experience of failure, not the frightened flight from it that is characteristic of the craven personality. Failure is a necessary concomitant of an ethic of achievement.

Second theme: we are not as free as we think we are

The illusion of free will is another element we must consider in any useful exegesis of failure. We are not as free, any of us, as we think we are. We are determined in a general way by the story of the universe and its accumulated expression in our own individual being. Each of us has a new brain floating above a sea of old passions, all of which come from our species’ deep history. And we are determined in particular by our own family history, which none of us chose. No one can edit their past, though it can help to understand how it made us what we became. The English poet Philip Larkin (2003, p. 142) understood this. In his poem ‘This be the Verse’, he claimed parents mess up their offspring, even if they do not mean to. Having been ‘fucked up’ by their parents, they pass their faults and misery on to their offspring.

The same idea was expressed more philosophically by the English ethicist Mary Warnock:

If we think about the nature of human choice we must recognize that, though what people want and choose may in some sense be explicable, it cannot be completely predictable because of the innumerable contingencies within the context of which a choice is made. If everything were known and if I lived in laboratory conditions where the contingencies and chance happenings could be kept on record from the moment of my birth, then my choices might appear foregone conclusions if anyone could be bothered to draw them. But we do not live in such conditions and never could. We could never know all that happened in the past to influence me, nor what was even now happening to limit or guide my choices. We feel free because we act against a background of ignorance, including ignorance of our own genetic system and of the input of circumstances and environment on the computer that is our own brain. Spinoza said that freedom was the ignorance of necessity.

(1992, p. 1045)

Second consequential suggestion

We need an anthropology based on compassionate realism about the human condition. We are morally hybrid creatures who are not wholly in control of ourselves. How should we respond to our predicament? A philosopher who is a helpful guide here is Hannah Arendt (2000), who writes:

Though we don’t know what we are doing when we are acting, we have no possibility ever to undo what we have done. Action processes are not only unpredictable, they are also irreversible; there is no author or maker who can undo, destroy, what he has done if he does not like it or when the consequences are disastrous. The possible redemption from the predicament of irreversibility is the faculty of forgiving, and the remedy for unpredictability is contained in the faculty to make and keep promises. The two remedies belong together: forgiving relates to the past and serves to undo its deeds, while binding oneself through promises serves to set up in the ocean of future uncertainty islands of security without which not even continuity, let alone durability of any kind, would ever be possible in the relationships between men. Without being forgiven, released from the consequences of what we have done, our capacity to act would, as it were, be confined to one single deed from which we could never recover; we would remain the victim of its consequences for ever … Without being bound to the fulfillment of promises, we would never be able to achieve that amount of identity and continuity which together produce the ‘person’ about whom a story can be told; each of us would be condemned to wander helplessly and without direction in the darkness of his own lonely heart, caught in its ever changing moods, contradictions, and equivocalities. In this respect, forgiving and making promises are like control mechanisms built into the very faculty to start new and unending processes.

(2000, pp. 180–181)

So the remedy for our predicament is the twofold strategy of promising and forgiving.

Third theme: how do we recover a culture of promising and forgiving?

Before offering some suggestions, let me first publish a health warning. We should rid ourselves of the hope of perfection either in ourselves or in our institutions (e.g. if only we could find the right structure, programme, guru, religion, leader, psychoanalytic theory, therapeutic approach or manual of military tactics). Perfectionist abstractions only become other modalities of our imperfection, but their seductive power makes them particularly dangerous. In The Chestnut Casts His Flambeaux, poet A.E. Housman (1922) got it right: ‘The troubles of our proud and angry dust/Are from eternity, and shall not fail’.

Nevertheless, there are things we can do to manage the muddle better, and a good way to begin is to understand the power of the promise in helping us manage the unruly reality of human nature. Implicit in the promise is moral realism, aimed at arming the subject against the unpredictability of circumstance, including the unpredictability of their own nature. Self-knowledge is an important part of this process. Acknowledge from the choices you have made the kind of person you have revealed yourself to be. Only radical self-knowledge will enable you to modify your character.

Just as important, if we are to learn from our failures, is the faculty of forgiving. One of the paradoxes of forgiveness is that it is the remedy for those who have broken their promises, so its very possibility makes us more likely to acknowledge the mistakes we have made and even benefit from them. Forgiveness is as important to stable institutions as is the pledged or promised life. This is the element in the human contract that is particularly weak in our culture at the moment. For whatever reason, we seem to be living through a particularly vengeful time, and the surveillance capacity of the media, amplified by its insatiable appetite for disclosures and revelation, adds to the sense of pressure public figures live under. Nietzsche had an interesting thing to say on this subject. In an early essay on the Use and Abuse of History he writes:

In order to determine the extent and thereby the boundary point at which past things must be forgotten if they are not to become the grave diggers of the present, one has to know the exact extent of the plastic energy of a person, of a people, of a culture; that is, the power to grow uniquely from within, to transform and incorporate the past and the unknown, to heal wounds, to replace what is lost, and to duplicate shattered structures from within … There are people so lacking this energy that they bleed to death, as if from a tiny scratch, after a single incident, a single pain, and often in particular a single minor injustice.

(1997, p. 62)

How are we to recover the capacity for forgiveness in a vengeful culture that has destroyed the distance that used to cloak our mistakes from the public gaze? Let me, in conclusion, offer my:

Third Consequential Suggestion

To his most famous novel, Howard’s End, E.M. Forster appended the epigraph ‘ONLY CONNECT’. The novel’s theme was the sexual hypocrisy of Edwardian England. In particular, Henry Wilcox’s hypocrisy is revealed when he refuses to help the needy Leonard Bast because he is afraid that assisting him might uncover the affair he had had with his wife.

Our moral and personal failures are great teachers of compassion and forgiveness; but only if we learn to connect them to others’ failures. In She Teaches Lear, the Scottish poet Iain Crichton Smith (1985) wisely reminded us that ‘From our own weakness only are we kind’ (p. 54). In ‘Old Woman’, his poem about one who failed to connect, Smith described a harsh, cold woman who forgave no one. Not even when alone and ageing did ‘she forgive our poor journey and our common grave’ (p. 18). Nothing is more calculated to entrench our fear of failure than our own failure to forgive. The bewitching paradox of the moral life is that it is our failures that teach us the greatest lesson, forgiveness. Only connect …

The other paradox worth noting is the spiritual danger our moral successes place us in. It was Yehuda Amichai (1996), the greatest Israeli poet of the twentieth century, who taught me that le...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Vincent Van Gogh and the Paradox of Failure
• Introduction: Fail up! Analyzing failures and using them to our advantage
• Part I Failing and forgiving
• Part II Society-wide failure
• Part III Failure in the family
• Part IV Therapeutic Failure
• Part V Professional failure in the consulting room and on the career path
• Part VI Integrity vs despair: facing failure in the final phase of the life cycle
• Part VII Metaphoric bridges and creativity
• Part VIII The long shadow of childhood relational trauma
• Part IX Reflections and final words
• Index