Failure

Within the depth-psychology corpus, failure is not treated as a merely negative outcome to be avoided or corrected but as a category of experience carrying positive psychological and even ontological weight. The field distributes its attention across several distinct registers. Winnicott anchors the term developmentally, distinguishing between privation (environmental failure before the infant can perceive it) and deprivation (failure after adequate provision has been established), arguing that the antisocial tendency is always a response to a real, historically specific environmental failure and simultaneously an expression of hope. Giegerich radicalizes this by reading apparent failure — the inability to ‘lift the cat’ — as epistemically indispensable: the very condition through which the psychologist learns to experience the ontological in the empirical. Hillman, from the perspective of the daimon and the acorn, treats a failed examination or a thwarted ambition as potentially meaningful signals from the soul about misdirected callings. Kurtz and Ketcham ground failure within a spirituality of imperfection, holding that error and failure are the norm of lived experience and the very precondition of genuine spiritual formation. Pargament, by contrast, documents how religion itself can fail as a coping resource, demanding empirical accountability. Herman locates a specific developmental failure — the failure to achieve object constancy — at the root of borderline psychopathology. Across these voices, the consistent tension is between failure as deficit to be remedied and failure as disclosure, initiatory ordeal, or necessary condition for deeper understanding.

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The point is to learn to experience the ontological or logical in the ontic or empirical, and to learn it through what appears to be a failure, if seen from outside. The realization comes after the fact. The failure to ‘lift the cat’ and the failure to ‘see through’ are indispensable.

Giegerich argues that certain failures are epistemically necessary: the soul’s logical life can only be disclosed through what presents, from the outside, as failure, making failure indispensable to genuine psychological understanding.

Giegerich, Wolfgang, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020thesis

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Failure here is called privation. In between is failure on top of success, failure of the environment that was perceived by the child as such at the time that the failure occurred.

Winnicott articulates a precise developmental taxonomy distinguishing privation (pre-perceptual environmental failure) from deprivation (perceived failure following good-enough provision), each producing distinct psychopathological trajectories.

Winnicott, Donald, The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment, 1965thesis

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Spirituality teaches us, or has taught most of us, how to deal with failure. We learn at a very Jung age that failure is the norm in life … errors are part of the game, part of its rigorous truth.

Kurtz and Ketcham position failure as the normative condition of human existence, arguing that authentic spirituality is constituted precisely by the capacity to inhabit imperfection rather than transcend it.

Kurtz, Ernest, Ketcham, Katherine, The Spirituality of Imperfection Storytelling and the, 1994thesis

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An exam tests more than your endurance, ability, and knowledge; it tests your calling. Does your daimon want the path you have chosen? … a failed exam may be how the daimon lets us know we’ve been headed wrong.

Hillman reframes failure as a potential communication from the daimon, relocating the locus of meaning from personal inadequacy to the soul’s own intelligent, if oblique, guidance.

Hillman, James, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996thesis

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One authority describes the primary defect in borderline personality disorder as a ‘failure to achieve object constancy,’ that is, a failure to form reliable and well-integrated inner representations.

Herman situates a specific developmental failure — the inability to form stable internal object representations — as the psychoanalytic account of the primary deficit underlying borderline personality disorder.

Herman, Judith Lewis, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror, 1992supporting

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Failure here means that the impoverishment of the personality carries along with it a failure in establishment of a relation to society as a whole, on account of the hidden illness element.

Winnicott distinguishes success and failure in the individual’s attempt to socialize character distortion, with failure producing a breakdown in the capacity to establish a viable relation to society.

Winnicott, Donald, The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment, 1965supporting

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The critical question that remains unanswered is ‘Why?’ How do we account for the failures of religion in coping?

Pargament opens an empirical inquiry into the conditions under which religion fails as a coping mechanism, demanding explanatory accountability rather than assuming religion’s universal efficacy.

Pargament, Kenneth I, The psychology of religion and coping theory, research,, 2001supporting

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The error lies in the use of religious explanations that leave no room for other interpretations, including those that are well grounded empirically.

Pargament identifies a specific mode of religious failure in coping: the use of closed theological explanations that foreclose empirical understanding and produce harmful scapegoating.

Pargament, Kenneth I, The psychology of religion and coping theory, research,, 2001supporting

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Integrative failure increases along the continuum, with trauma-related dissociation existing more toward the other end. Profound integrative failure is at the most extreme, manifesting as two or more dissociative parts.

Ogden maps integrative failure across a developmental continuum, identifying it as the core mechanism underlying dissociative pathology from mild self-state differences to profound structural dissociation.

Ogden, Pat, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Interventions for Trauma and, 2015supporting

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Hence the distinction between failure and transgression, the second of Piers’s criteria for the differentiation of shame from guilt. Shame accompanies failure because it is concerned with goals and ideals.

Cairns, following Piers, distinguishes failure (associated with shame and the ego-ideal) from transgression (associated with guilt and the superego), providing a psychoanalytic grounding for the differential phenomenology of these affect states.

Douglas L. Cairns, Aidos: The Psychology and Ethics of Honour and Shame in Ancient Greek Literature, 1993supporting

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particular care should be taken to avoid confounding coping efforts (attempts to attain significance) with coping outcomes (the success or failure of these attempts).

Pargament calls for methodological precision in coping research by insisting that the effort to cope must be analytically distinguished from its success or failure as an outcome.

Pargament, Kenneth I, The psychology of religion and coping theory, research,, 2001supporting

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Any ‘price’ you feel you may have paid for achieving any type of success, financial or otherwise, was really a price of failure.

Wu Wei inverts the conventional success/failure binary by arguing that any sacrifice entailed on the road to achievement is properly attributed to failure, not success.

Wu Wei, The I Ching Handbook: Getting What You Want, 1999aside

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