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“[Artistic temperament] sometimes seems to me to be a battleground, a dark angel of destruction and a bright angel of creativity wrestling—”
The dark angel of destruction undoing therapeutic progress is the subject of this beautifully curated and outstanding book about the negative therapeutic reaction (NTR), edited and written by Léon Wurmser and long-time collaborator Heidrun Jarass, with additional contributions by Jorg Frommer, Mathias Hirsch, Joseph Lichtenberg, Shelley Orgel, Anna Ornstein, Cordelia Schmidt-Hellerau, and Gerd Schmithusen.
Part of the Psychoanalytic Inquiry series, Nothing Good is Allowed to Stand is both stellar and stellate in construction. The introduction offers a summary of the NTR that does not get bogged down in any one perspective, highlighting how shame, guilt, jealousy, envy and spoiling, and narcissistic motivations underlie the NTR across theoretical schools, then reviewing both these schools and important individual articles about the NTR in the psychoanalytic literature.
“The passion for destruction is also creative passion.”
Almost all of the authors cited emphasize the protective and positive functions of the NTR. In rejecting the analyst's healing interpretation,