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Learning from experience implies effort, pain, and contact with reality. Only by accepting the frustration linked to this situation does a work of transformation and growth (both for people as well as for groups and organizations), become possible. The conceptual and methodological bases established by the ARIP and Connexions make it possible to think about the conditions of success and failure of learning through experience in organizations. These same psychosociological bases are useful for analyzing the crisis that the ARIP itself went through in the 1980s. Following on from these reflections, the paper examines the consequences of the institutionalization of psychosociology in France and raises the question of the price to be paid for the respectability obtained from its recognition by universities. Finally, the psychologization of social relations, the social valorization of individual suffering, and the sociologization of compassion are analyzed as symptoms of the difficulty in maintaining a real capacity for thinking and learning from one’s experience.