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While already in the Papers on Technique and his work with the Wolf Man, Freud talked of deterioration in treatment, it would not be until his Ego and the Id that he would treat negative therapeutic reaction (NTR) more completely as an unconsciously intentional masochistic wish to limit the Self and seek revenge on the analyst
by undoing the good works that the analyst had imparted. For two-thirds of the subsequent 90 years, the analytic theory of the NTR changed only insofar as our notions of masochism altered. NTR was, what shall we say, “analysands acting ungraciously.” This would continue while our theory of praxis remained centered on the principle that the analyst's interpretations were presumed to be on-target, if not totally free of countertransference; the word enactment had not only not appeared in our lexicon of respectable language but the notion of enactment was reserved for the great unwashed and unanalyzed masses who practiced lesser forms of psychotherapy.
Then, something happened. Even if post-modernism had not powerfully taken hold of sectors of Psychoanalysis for a brief period of time, the notion of the unitary Self came and remains under vigorous attack. Here, in the United States, more than five movements began taking hold, led by the likes of Beebe and Lachmann, Kohut, Mitchell, Renik, Stern, and Stolorow et al. And whether these centers of psychoanalytic productivity arose out of object relations theory, traditional clinical experience, hermeneutic-existential-phenomenological traditions in philosophy, or careful study of mother-infant dyads, psychoanalysis was to be changed for the foreseeable future. Now, there were others who viewed intersubjectivity in a less entangled form in which the goal of treatment was for each participant to the therapeutic endeavor to come to see the other as a subject in their own right. Still, even in this less intense notion of a co-constructed intersubjectivity, the notion that the analyst could remain above