No, twice no: An attempt to define and dismantle the ‘negative therapeutic reaction’

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Notes

1. Translated by Andrew Weller.

2. Third Conference of the European Federation of Psychoanalysis London, October 1979. The papers presented at this Conference were published in the Bulletin (Volume 16) of the Federation. This article is a reworked and enlarged version of my own paper.

3. Allusion to Freud's (1915) text, A case of paranoia running counter to the theory of the disease.

4. Translator's note: in French “il m'a fait un N.T.R”.

5. We should remember these lines from Analysis terminable and interminable: “One portion of this force has been recognized by us, undoubtedly with justice, as the sense of guilt and need for punishment, and has been located by us in the ego's relation to the superego. But this is only the portion of it which is, as it were, psychically bound by the superego, and thus becomes recognizable; other quotas of the same force, whether bound or free, may be at work in other unspecified places (1937, p. 242, author's emphasis).

6. I have not succeeded in establishing which current of the medicine of the time this expression was linked to.

7. Translator's note: with reference to Molière's (1661) comedy (Stone, 1961).

8. Cf. the following passage from Analysis terminable and interminable: “No one individual, of course, makes use of all the mechanisms of defence. Each person uses no more than a selection of them. But these become fixated in his ego. They become regular modes of reaction of his character, of institutions” (p. 237, author's emphasis).

9. I say ‘precursory’ because many of the traits with which contemporary psychoanalysis is credited have already been traced with a sure hand by Abraham: apparent submission to the fundamental rule, identification with the analyst in the place of transference, defiance, envy and, above all, narcissism.

10. The expression ‘negative reaction’ can be found as early as 1910 in the ‘Rat Man’.

11. François Gantheret's expression.

12. For a fuller description of this state, already noted by Ferenczi, see Pontalis, 1974.

13. I sometimes find that my patients – and, for that matter, my colleagues too – are singularly non‐reactive in their willingness to comply with the fundamental rule and with what the analyst says, or in submitting to the code of the Master.

14. My emphasis. These words condense the remarks I made in my article Sur la douleur psychique (Pontalis, 1977b).

15. Translator's note: in English in the original.

16. Winnicott's terms the ‘good enough mother’ or the ‘good enough environment’ do not signify in any way an appeal to the good mother, as those who turn up their noses at the expression which they assume is naive believe. In fact, good enough or bad enough is one and the same thing. Winnicott is not Melanie Klein. His whole problematic aims even at rejecting the Kleinian manichaeistic conception of the good and the bad object. “It's good enough for me” means: “I don't need anything more, that's suits me fine”.

17. Translator's note: L'Histoire d'O, published in 1954 by the French author Anne Declos.

18. It has to be recognized that the Kleinians were almost exclusively the only ones to speak about the negative therapeutic reaction. Apart from the article by Joan Rivière already cited, see H. Rosenfeld (1975).

19. See the text by Gabrielle Dorey, Entre le deuil et la trahison, la femme (1982) which stresses the decisive and permanent impact on the destiny of a woman of this ‘no’ of the mother.

20. Translator's note : in French, “nous nous payons de mots”, which leads to the word play which follows, “il faut donc que nous payions autrement”.

21. Which Fritz Zorn, who does not let anyone to approach him at all, does not allow us to do.