In this book the editors have solicited the unique and unmediated voices of fifteen leading psychotherapists, who share intimate and revealing stories from their clinic of professional incidents that shook the therapeutic bond and left a scar in both parties. The contributors courageously agreed to revisit the cases that still burn inside of them, attempting to conceptualise these and give them words, and to demonstrate the mutual vulnerability inherent within the psychoanalytic and psychotherapeutic endeavour. While failure is recognised as developmentally necessary and a cornerstone in the formation and maintenance of attachment relationships, stories of therapeutic failures are seldom told in our profession. Can we fully recognise our failures without shaming ourselves and others? Can we bear it while attending to our narcissistic wounds and rescue fantasy? This book addresses all of these concerns, while examining what relational theory and practice has to contribute to the understanding of, and working with, therapeutic failure.Table of Contents: Foreword -- Introduction -- Beyond Binaries -- Introduction to Part I -- Challenging the success-failure polarity in therapeutic practice -- Enactment, acknowledgement, and the bearing of badness -- Life is no picnic -- Techniques: Holding on and Letting Go -- Introduction to Part II -- “Put Down the Duckie”: analytic vigour, rigour, and relinquishment -- Technique as therapeutic escape -- Old ladies, exhausted souls, and a large sack of healing herbs -- Enactments: When Biographies and Self-States Converge -- Introduction to Part III -- The fear of breakdown and the fear from breakthrough -- Failing with dignity -- A Failure with a capital F -- Affects on the Edge -- Introduction to Part IV -- Like a drop at the lip of a glass -- Daring anger and intimacy: clinical failure or success? -- Broader Perspectives -- Introduction to Part V -- An informal account of therapeutic outcomes in one practice of psychotherapy over a twenty year period -- We met in borrowed space -- Failures, challenges, and learning within the field of intercultural psychotherapy, supervision, and training -- Losing my religion? Psychotherapeutic practice as repetition compulsion of character rigidity