Dear Pepillo,

I’m sorry to hear this. In my opinion your supervisor sounds pretty inadequate and frankly unethical to be telling you this right before your review. Some of the best research has come through working through dead ends and refocusing; that’s why it is the best, because it comes from working through a difficult problem. And that takes time. The fact that your supervisor is not able to support you through this stage of your PhD which most of us go through (ok I am in the humanities not sciences, but I also have a math degree so I know well enough what kind of snags science students get into) says more about him than you. As for maintaining dignity by quitting before failing, I have been through two sets of comprehensive exams, failed one and got a distinction on the other one. Failing is not actually the worst thing that can happen to you IMO (or IME, I should say); it’s corny but the only way to really fail is if you don’t give yourself the chance in the first place to succeed. My suggestion to you is just tell yourself how brave you are being by going through with this despite all of your fears and the crap from on high. And make walking through that door your own personal barometer of success, not the committee’s decision. After failing/redoing my first exam, I walked into my second exam a year later being completely convinced that I would fail again, and the only thing that got me through it was telling myself, blindly and stupidly, that I had already succeeded one my own terms by being brave enough to it. Yes it is worth a lot, and yes the consequences will be shitty for you jobwise if they fail you, but you also have other options if this were to happen and your own self worth is separate from their judgment of you. Your committee has no real power (though I know how much it seems as if they do).

Oh, and about failing, the brilliant philosopher Simone Weil has an interesting thing where she argues that being able to pay attention to our failures and think through them (wherever or not any resolution is achieved) is the most valuable and brave work that we can do. http://simoneweil.net/attention.htm . Worthwhile reading
Best of luck to you.
(robin)