ABSTRACT
Good ideas sometimes have side effects. Back in 1966, Jack Brehm defined reactance as a motivational state aroused in response to threatened behavioral freedom that motivates a person to restore that freedom. As Sharon Brehm (1976) pointed out a quarter of a century ago, this construct has enormous implications for clinical psychology. It helps to explain how some people get stuck, why they don’t change, and why some treatments don’t work. Most clinical researchers, however, construed reactance as a trait with the hope that recognizing a client as “reactant” would guide clinicians to better tailor intervention strategies to client type and thereby increase treatment efficacy. As a result, the construct of reactance was recast from motivational state to personality trait and was most frequently investigated as a client attribute, hypothesized to interact with type of treatment within the framework of the attribute-by-treatment research paradigm (ATI; Beutler, 1991; Shoham-Salomon & Hannah, 1991; Snow, 1991). As this line of research turned highly problematic, we propose that clinical psychology has much to gain by restoring reactance to its original meaning as a motivational state.
