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Negation never proceeds from reasoning but from something much more obscure and old. Arguments come afterward, to justify and sustain it. Every no rises out of the blood.
— E. M. Cioran
ANNA FREUD'S EFFORT TO GAIN clinical and theoretical perspective in Difficulties in the Path of Psychoanalysis(1969) reaffirmed the view that "the more seriously an individual is torn by conflicts and contradictory forces within himself, the more opportunity he provides for profitable exploration" during the course of analytic treatment (p. 8). Since its inception, psychoanalytic theory has derived primarily from critical questions posed by the often turbulent negativity of intrapsychic conflict and interactional distortion revealed within the framework of the clinical situation. The continuing concern of Freud (1916), (1918), (1923), (1924), (1937), and of numerous other subsequent investigators, with the problem of the "Negative Therapeutic Reaction" (N. T. R.)1 is a prime instance of that process fundamental to the evolution of psychoanalysis whereby serious clinical obstacles become an impetus for reassessment of theory leading to subsequent modifications in practice. The concept of N. T. R. is particularly instructive in this regard since this apparent "inverse" reaction to the progress of the treatment can become "the most powerful of all obstacles to recovery" (Freud, 1923; p. 49), evoking in the analyst a radical questioning of prior theoretical posture and customary technical approach.
After first critically reviewing the relevant literature on N. T. R.