ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the mechanisms that seem active in the negative therapeutic reaction. In a well-known passage, Sigmund Freud writes: There are certain people who behave in a quite peculiar fashion during the work of analysis. When one speaks hopefully to them or expresses satisfaction with the progress of the treatment, they show signs of discontent and their condition invariably worsens. Freud goes on, in an interesting passage, to refer to the situation when the sense of guilt is the product of an identification with someone who was once the object of an erotic cathexis. "A sense of guilt that has been adopted in this way is often the sole remaining trace of the abandoned love-relation and not at all easy to recognise as such". Freud is clearly referring to what would now term guilt in relation to a damaged internal object.
