Book review · Red Sistémica
All failures. Therapeutic experiences
Under a misleading title, the Argentine therapist Horacio Serebrinsky gathers a set of stories: stories from the consulting room, but also stories of family, friendship and football, published in a series of short stories rather than in a psychology list. The subtitle announces who the book is for — “for psychologists, patients and impatients” — and how it proceeds: by telling rather than theorising.
Who is the author
Doctor Horacio Serebrinsky is a psychologist and a therapist working with adults, couples, families and groups. He teaches in various universities and institutes, in Argentina and abroad, and directs the Argentine Systemic School.
What the book brings
A therapist’s book that is not a book of technique. Classifying it as “short stories” is a deliberate choice: what Serebrinsky conveys passes through narrative — what took place in a room, what was understood too late, what failed. For a therapist reading it, the interest lies in the place given to failure and to common sense, rarely claimed in the professional literature.
Mario Pergolini’s prologue
The review published by Red Sistémica reproduces the book’s prologue, signed by the Argentine journalist and broadcaster Mario Pergolini and dated summer 2011. We do not give a translation of it here: it is part of the book.
Pergolini recounts his embarrassment at being asked for a prologue — an invitation to enter an intimacy made public, on the same footing as being a witness at a wedding or godfather to a child — and then explains why the title is misleading: what these pages offer is a portrait of who Serebrinsky is, through his daughters, his wife, his father, his brothers, his friends and his mother, to whom one of the chapters is devoted. He concludes that everyone will recognise something in it: friends, because they appear in it; colleagues, because they will find there the idea that common sense is often worth more than what is learned in books; other readers, because they will come across a curious man who stopped to listen and to marvel at other people’s affairs.
This book review is an English translation of “Todos Fracasos. Experiencias Terapéuticas. Para psicólogos, pacientes e impacientes”, published by Red Sistémica (first published in Red Sistémica). Translated and republished with the journal’s permission.
Read the original articleHow to cite this article
Serebrinsky, H. (2023). All failures. Therapeutic experiences (Complexe Systémique, Trans.). Complexe Systémique. https://app.complexe-systemique.com/en_GB/articles/all-failures-therapeutic-experiences (Original work published in 2023 in Red Sistémica; republished in 2023 by Red Sistémica, https://redsistemica.ar/2023/02/08/todos-fracasos-experiencias-terapeuticas-para-psicologos-pacientes-e-impacientes/)
To go further
- The use of interrupted therapies: in search of craft-based trainingBraulio Montalvo: why one should train on failed therapies rather than on successful ones.
- Therapy as told by families. Emotional cut-offWhen it is the families who tell, years later, what the therapy did.
- Please help me with these familiesCarlos Sluzki on the therapeutic impasse and the recourse to a third party.
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