ABSTRACT
Making progress while undergoing psychoanalysis often induces painful anxiety and sadness. Analysands dread what lies ahead and mourn long-lasting commitments to themselves and others they are leaving behind. Now that they are changing their orientation to relationships and to themselves, they must work through shame, anxiety, feelings of loss, and guilt in the internal world. In reaction to these painful changes, they back away from opportunities for further progress and revert to manifestations of the maladaptive orientations they have been relinquishing. In the analytic lexicon, they are said to be engaging in negative therapeutic reactions.
