FAILURE NEUROSIS

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.

 

Weil, Annemarie P. (1978). Maturational variations and genetic-dynamic issues. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 26, 461-491