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Even more ambiguous in the psychoanalytic literature than the status of the negative therapeutic reaction is that of the therapeutic stalemate. Attesting to its uncertain position in our inventory of clinical concepts is its absence in the major psychoanalytic indexes. Frequently identified with the negative therapeutic reaction, therapeutic stalemate has shared with it the categorization of superego resistance (e.g., Glover, 1955; Panel, 1970) Alternatively, and most apocryphally, it has been attributed to a countertransferential blind spot or deficiency in the analyst. This latter perspective has often carried the implication that steady, tactful management of the analysand's unsettling aggressions, be they directed toward the analyst or himself, will carry the day in most instances. Although, to be sure, “even simple masochism … is a tax on our powers” (Freud, 1937, p. 243), improved technical responses to the “masochistic trend in the ego” (Freud, 1920, p. 14) have greatly facilitated the successful working through of these burdensome clinical problems (Brenner, 1959; Asch, 1976). But significant questions remain: Is stalemate invariably reducible to issues of self-analysis or reanalysis or to the need for better conceptual and technical tools? That is, must the analyst invariably assume the burden for the analysand's intransigence? In assuming this responsibility, must he invariably give priority to countertransferential issues, be they derived from his ignorance, psychology, or therapeutic weariness (Novick, 1980)?
Although I believe that the spectrum of negative reactions to the