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The positive and negative therapeutic reactions are in essence the same. They are therapeutic reactions intended to take attention away from psychoanalysis. Like the insistence on ‘cure’ as an objective for taking up analysis, they are objectives for continuing or stopping. They are ‘covers’, rationalizations – ‘reason’ operating in its role ‘as a slave to’ … what? The passions, or some unknown such as hatred or doubt?
When a small attendance at a meeting is deplored, it is explained that had the complainant been in charge how much better the result would have been; when he is one of the absentees, how good his reason for absence was. These are ‘therapeutic’ explanations; they heal
the traumata of decision, and decision is an essential of ‘achievement’ or the transformation of thought into action (thought as a substitute for, or a prelude to, action)