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The author explicates Weiss's theory that individuals who suffer trauma in childhood imagine that they have in some way injured family members. As adults, they harbor a baseless sense of guilt derived from "grim unconscious beliefs" in their culpability. He agrees with Weiss that this experience is the matrix of most neurotic symptoms and personality disorders. Clinically, patients will manifest their unconscious guilt by actively testing the psychotherapist in the hope that their frightful beliefs will be invalidated. If their efforts prove futile, they may develop intractable resistances or a negative therapeutic reaction. Bush suggests that one may test this theory by studying a patient's response to therapeutic interventions. He offers a brief report of a patient who resisted completing an apparently successful psychoanalysis soon after having set a termination date. Interpretations that focused on id resistance did not alter her attitude. Comments that addressed the unconscious fear that she would wound the psychoanalyst by separating from him yielded a statistically validated shift in her attitude toward the termination.