ABSTRACT
Understood in a wider sense, negative therapeutic reaction (NTR) does not refer to a purely psychological or intrapersonal, but to a communicative or interpersonal phenomenon. Affected by it are the patient and his or her counterpart, the analyst or therapist whose actions are thus part of the phenomenon. Moreover, the use of this negatively judgmental term points toward a particular world order or worldview, a particular conception of therapeutic success, to a normative order that determines what is positive or negative. This also accounts for the explosive nature of this topic: Focus on negative reactions not only throws light on the patient’s development, but also on the analyst’s interventions and judgments. Th is occurs most notably when analysts, effectively dazzled by their own authority and power of interpretation, quite simply misunderstand the patients, who for their part desire something completely different from what analysts assume, suspect, interpret, or consider to be a demonstration of therapeutic progress.
