You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Unbearable experience leaves its indelible mark on the human psyche. We are never so aware of this as when we enter into psychoanalytic engagement with those who have suffered the ravages of war,
oppression, abuse, neglect, and other forms of overwhelming impingement. In the context of such an experience, a person without adequate constitutional, developmental, and social resources adapts by creating interpersonal and intrapsychic accommodations that allow survival. If the analyst and patient are lucky, these accommodations find their way into the analysis with the possibility that they may be seen, felt, understood, symbolized, challenged, and modified in this new context. If this work is to be truly, deeply engaged, encountering a seemingly unbearable experience in the patient and analyst is not only inevitable, it is essential.
Nothing Good Is Allowed to Stand: An Integrative View of the Negative Therapeutic Reaction, edited by Leon Wurmser and Heidrun Jarass, provides a map, both broad and detailed, of the landscape of the so-called negative therapeutic reaction. From the intimate accounts of the lives and analyses of individuals to the large-scale effect of societal trauma and oppression, the book traces the course of unthinkable experience as it finds its resting place in the analytic dyad.
?tightAlthough I use the term “negative therapeutic reaction” (NTR) for ease of communication, the volume itself represents a challenge to the perspective that a painful, even destructive, undoing of progress is a solely negative event in the life of an analysis. As Frommer puts it in his chapter on the psychological impact of totalitarian repression, “… the use of this negatively judgmental term points toward a particular world order or worldview, a particular conception of the therapeutic success, to a normative order that determines what is positive or negative” (p. 129). He goes on to suggest that the patient may “desire something completely different from what analysts assu