ABSTRACT
The phenomenon of the negative therapeutic reaction in psychoanalytic treatment was first described and explained by Freud: There are certain people who behave in a quite peculiar fashion during the work of analysis. The early psychoanalytic literature on the negative therapeutic reaction was relatively sparse. Horney suggested that the negative therapeutic reaction is embedded in persons with a particular type of masochistic personality structure. There has been an increasing tendency to conceptualize the negative therapeutic reaction in terms of the vicissitudes of the child's relationships in the first years of life. The occurrence of the negative therapeutic reaction in patients who are prone to depression is a theme that has been referred to in the literature from 1936 onwards. It has been noted that for some patients success represents, paradoxically, a move away from, or a loss of, an 'ideal' state of the self connected with certain harsh demands of the patient's conscience.
