ABSTRACT
Throughout its history, psychoanalysis has necessarily and usefully concerned itself with problems related to impasse—for practical clinical reasons as well as for theoretical ones. Impasse is a situation of no movement, and hence of a failure or at least a partial failure of therapeutic results. There are some treatments that seem to come to a particular kind of impasse. As described thoroughly by Martin Cooperman, this impasse has two distinct clinical characteristics. First, the progressive development of the treatment and of the treatment relationship is interrupted or even reversed by the behaviour of the patient. Second, the therapist “experiences a loss of good feeling”. The kind of impasse typified by the defeating process reflects an abrupt and premature separateness of the therapist and a disturbance in a healthily developing transitional relatedness. Pathologic transitional relatedness forces an illusion to the point of delusion, and cannot contact reality.
