ABSTRACT
Casement (2002) has drawn particular attention to the process of learning from our mistakes as psychotherapists. He stresses that we are often going to get it `wrong' and we need to learn to work with this process of `failing' the client. If we can acknowledge a mistake and work with the process of failure in the relationship with the client, then a process of repair can occur which can be profoundly therapeutic. In 1963 Winnicott pointed out this process: `In the end the patient uses the analyst's failures, often quite small ones . . . and we have to put up with being in a limited context misunderstood. The operative factor is that the patient now hates the analyst for the failure that originally came as an environmental factor, outside the infant's omnipotent control, but that is now staged in the transference' (p. 344). In this sense Winnicott considers that it is inevitable that we fail the client but that the healing factor is when the process, now under the client's control in the room with the therapist, can be worked through. The client can bring the bad external factor into the therapeutic relationship and we can address this.
