ABSTRACT
Who could doubt the wisdom of Rudyard Kipling’s claim that being able to treat triumph and disaster—“those two imposters”—the same is a mark of maturity? Easier said than done, however, if you happen to make your living as a therapist! The siren call of the success-failure polarity seems to sound particularly sweet to our ears. Many published clinical vignettes read as if their authors, after struggling valiantly, had reached unequivocally successful outcomes; failures, if they are mentioned at all, are usually attributed to the patients’ previous therapists. So widely shared is our delight in celebrating our therapeutic coups, and so great is our reluctance to let the world in on relationships that never get off the ground or land with a thud after a promising start (see Goldberg, 2012), that we rarely question the usefulness or validity of viewing our work as either successful or as a failure.
