Yes, there are—though they are rare, courageous, and often buried beneath layers of euphemism or theory. Most psychotherapy and psychoanalysis literature has historically been biased toward “success narratives” or stories with redemptive closure. However, a few stand out for their radical honesty about failure, boundary collapse, therapist helplessness, or emotional dead-ends.
Here are some of the most important honest failure stories in the literature:
1. Irvin D. Yalom – “If Rape Were Legal…”
(from Love’s Executioner, 1989)
- A chilling tale of a deeply misogynistic patient who fantasizes about rape and openly despises women.
- Yalom tries every empathic angle, but realizes he cannot change this man—he only learns to tolerate him.
- The “failure” here is existential: some people may not be reachable.
- One of the most ethically complex pieces in Yalom’s work.
2. Patrick Casement – Learning from the Patient (1985)
- Casement, a British analyst, shares detailed moments of misattunement, countertransference errors, and failed interpretations.
- Instead of avoiding these failures, he treats them as the real material of learning.
- He admits to acting out, overinterpreting, and even shutting down emotionally—on the record.
3. Philip Bromberg – Standing in the Spaces (1998)
- Bromberg shares several moments where he loses the therapeutic field, misreads dissociation, or gets emotionally entangled.
- He sees failure not as collapse, but as a portal to deeper relational work—but doesn’t idealize it.
- His account of treating a severely dissociative patient who “leaves the room while still sitting there” is haunting.
4. D. W. Winnicott – “Hate in the Countertransference” (1947)
- Winnicott boldly admits that therapists can and do hate their patients.
- He lists, unapologetically, all the reasons a therapist may feel hatred—including boredom, coercion, narcissistic injury.
- He views failure to acknowledge this hatred as a deeper failure than hatred itself.
5. Stephen Mitchell – Influence and Autonomy in Psychoanalysis (1997)
- Mitchell recounts a case where he realizes he is over-identifying with the patient’s growth—essentially, falling in love with his own reflection in the patient.
- The “failure” is not dramatic but philosophical: the illusion of mastery.
- His honesty breaks from the neutral observer myth.
6. Donald Winnicott – the case of the “Failed Mother”
- In his clinical diaries and supervision notes, Winnicott reflects on his sense of failure in maternal transference cases.
- He believed that some patients needed to experience the therapist’s failure in order to grow—but this came at a psychic cost, including deep self-doubt on the therapist’s part.
7. Jacques Lacan – The Case of Aimée (1932 thesis)
- Lacan’s early case of “Aimée,” a woman who attacked an actress in a delusional state, led to no cure.
- Yet the case formed the basis of his theory of psychosis and the mirror stage.
- It’s a failure-as-beginning: the analyst cannot “treat,” but can be captured by the logic of the patient’s world.
8. Robert Stolorow – Trauma and Human Existence (2007)
- Stolorow writes from his own grief after the sudden death of his wife.
- He speaks not only of therapeutic failures but of the impossibility of analytic neutrality in the face of shared human trauma.
- His failure is ontological: analysis cannot rescue us from the Real.
9. Thomas Ogden – “The Analyst’s Analyst” (1986)
- Ogden tells the story of treating a therapist whose countertransference undid the entire process.
- Ogden himself became entangled and misused interpretation to avoid intimacy.
- He calls it a “joint failure,” and refuses to wrap it up with a lesson.
10. Lou Andreas-Salomé – Letters to Freud (1912–1933)
- In her personal correspondence, Salomé reflects on the failures of language, on moments when psychoanalysis cannot reach what poetry can, and on the failure of theory to contain desire.
- While not clinical reports, her letters are existential autopsies of the analytic process itself.
Why these stories matter:
They remind us that:
- Not all therapy works.
- Not all wounds heal.
- Some people resist change, and some therapists cannot find the thread.
- But even in failure, there is revelation, and sometimes even a deeper form of care—one that mourns its own limit.
Would you like me to write a piece titled:
〈當療癒失敗：心理治療文學中的誠實時刻〉
When Therapy Fails: The Honest Moments in Psychotherapy Literature
I think it would resonate powerfully with your ongoing work on 自體的心理學的最後一章 and the ethics of witnessing.
