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Articles

Failure and Shame in Professional Practice

The Role of Social Pain, the Haunting of Loss

Pages 268-278
Published online: 28 Dec 2017
 
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When our professional work with an individual or group fails and ends without resolution, the experience of shame is often reported. This may point to the particular interpersonal nature of our practices, in which failure and shame can be understood in terms of social pain dynamics, a pain often haunted by a loss from which nothing may be recoverable.

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Author information

N. Michel Landaiche

Author Biography
N. Michel Landaiche, III, PhD, is a psychotherapist and training supervisor for the student counseling center at Carnegie Mellon University and additionally serves as a faculty member teaching Bowen Family Systems Theory for the Western Pennsylvania Family Center. The author would like to thank his colleague Alessandra Pierini, whose direct expression of interest spurred him to action and language before still more time had passed and was lost. He would also like to express gratitude to his colleague Srilatha Juvva, whose practice of humility helped him recognize that the pressing need to write would not be met by another decade of journaling and research but only within the limits of what was practical, in this case an article, in this case now not later. A prior version of this paper was published in Italian as “Fallimento e Vergogna nell’Esercizio Della Professione: Il Ruolo del Dolore Sociale, L’Ossessione della Sconfitta,” in Rivista Italiana di Analisi Transazionale e Metodologie Psicoterapeutiche, n. 27: 2013 (64), pp. 9-23. N. Michel Landaiche, III, can be reached at 5018 Penn Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA 15224, USA; email: .
 

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