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Nothing Good Is Allowed to Stand serves at once as a partial epitaph, and a new beginning, for the concept of the negative therapeutic reaction. It is co-edited by Léon Wurmser, known for his intensive scholarship on some of the most difficult problems in clinical psychoanalysis: addiction, envy and pathological jealousy, pervasive shame, masochism, and the severe superego. Wurmser's co-editor, Heidrun Jarass, is an analyst in Nürnberg, Germany. In addition to serving as a bridge between the past and present status of a major psychoanalytic concept, Nothing Good Is Allowed to Stand spans North American, Latin American, and German perspectives on the negative therapeutic reaction, the last little known in the U.S. for reasons of psychoanalytic social history. (I would challenge any of my American psychoanalytic colleagues to name more than one contemporary German analyst.)
Nothing Good is partial epitaph, in that Freud's original formulation of the negative therapeutic reaction, in terms almost exclusively of a patient's response toward his own therapeutic gains due to guilt, is inevitably pushed to a corner as factors later appreciated in conceiving the origins of entrenched suffering and negativity in treatment come to the fore. In many ways, this is a volume interrogating marked patient negativity in analysis generally, rather than as a response to at least apparent improvement: it is really more often about “nothing good is allowed” than “nothing good is allowed to stand” (i.e., to be achieved and then undone) in an analysis. The editors contemplated maintaining a narrow definition of the negative therapeutic reaction, but in the end they, and the contributors to this volume, have concluded that such a definition is too slim to stand if it is to have clinical utility in today's world.