The nosographical
category of failure neurosis was created and applied mainly in France, as a
result of René Laforgue's writings. It is defined in his book Psychopathologie
de l'échec (The psychopathology of failure; 1941): "We thus speak of the
failure of an individual's emotional life or social activity. The person
derives from the affective failure itself the strength and the voluptuousness
that transforms the unhappiness into happiness.".
Freud did indeed describe this "character-type" among the
causes of resistance to the symptom analysis (1916d). Taking the examples of
Lady Macbeth and Rebecca West, a character in Ibsen's Rosmersholm, he showed
how guilt linked to the possible realization of forbidden desires could lead to
a failure as soon as the consciously desired goal was achieved in reality.
Laforgue continued this oedipal theme, elaborating it from the notion of the
superego.
Failure as "fear of
success" translates psychically into inhibitions, depression, even
delusions, or physically into clumsiness or accidents of varying degrees,
perhaps even fatal. These disorders can correspond to punishment for
transgressing a prohibition (appearing after a significant success) or the
impossibility of successfully completing a task required by the ego ideal.
Other forms have been linked to survivor guilt after the death of a highly
cathected object or a catastrophic experience (the Holocaust, for example).
These states are usually accompanied by a depressed tone but, as Roy Schafer
pointed out, we must be careful not to see all these subjects as
"masochists" because this description would imply a sexualization of
suffering, which is not always present.
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1916d).
Some character-types met with in psycho-analytic work. SE, 14: 309-333.
——. (1923b). The ego and
the id. SE, 19: 1-66.
Glover, Edward. (1939).
Review of Clinical aspects of psychoanalysis, by René Laforgue, Hogarth and
Inst. Psycho-Anal., London, 1938. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 20,
196-197.
Laforgue, René. (1941).
Psychopathologie de l'échec. Marseille: Les Cahiers du Sud.
Laforgue, René. (1984).
Clinical aspects of psycho-analysis (Joan Hall, Trans.). New York: Da Capo.
(Original work published 1936)
Mâle, Pierre. (1971).
Quelques aspects de la psychopathologie et de la psychothérapieà l'adolescence.
Confrontations psychiatriques, 7, 103-124.
Schafer, Roy. (1988).
Those wrecked by success. In Robert A. Glick and Donald I. Meyers (Eds.),
Masochism: Contemporary psychoanalytic perspective (pp. 81-92). Hillsdale, NJ:
Analytic Press.
