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Negative reactions to psychoanalytic treatment were first described by Freud (1916) when he mentioned the story of a young, adventurous woman who had rebelled against her parents and run away from home. After many difficulties she became reconciled to her family and found a young artist who wanted to marry her. From that time onward she began to neglect the house, imagined herself persecuted by her lover's family, hindered her lover in his work and social life, and then succumbed to an incurable mental illness. Freud realized that the paradoxical behaviour of this woman was caused by guilt which had set in motion dangerous and forbidden wishes. In other words, he regarded this reaction as being induced by her conscience. Two years later Freud (1918: 69) wrote of ‘The Wolf Man’ that he had the habit of producing transitory ‘negative reactions’ every time something had been conclusively cleared up in the analysis. Freud felt this reaction related to the way children respond to prohibitions before they accede to them. Typically they repeat the prohibited act once more and only then stop it. In this way, Freud felt, they create the impression that changing their ways is under their control and so maintain some degree of omnipotence. In 1923 Freud introduced the term ‘negative therapeutic reaction’1 and in subsequent writings linked it with disorders in super-ego development and with his theory of the death instinct (Freud 1923, 1924).
Since Freud, many analysts have described chronic resistance to analysis and have developed their own theories about it – very often following Freud in drawing attention to problems connected with guilt, super-ego formation, and omnipotence. Among them Abraham (1919)