Int J Psychoanal (2014) 95:533–551 doi: 10.1111/1745-8315.

12214

No, twice no: An attempt to define and dismantle the

‘negative therapeutic reaction’

J.-B. Pontalis – vachssmf@outlook.com

A1 recent Congress announced on its programme: ‘New perspectives on the

negative therapeutic reaction’.2 It is an interesting sign of the times, for psy-
choanalysts scarcely ever speak about the N.T.R and the literature on the
question, in comparison with the mass of publications, is quite scarce. But
analysts are increasingly concerned with the limits and effectiveness of the
treatment, with the value and stability of its results. Judging by what they
say, one would imagine that they are no longer confronted with anything
but ‘impossible cases’. What’s more, they question whether their models are
really pertinent to the treatment. It is as if experience did not so much ‘con-
tradict’3 the theory – a contradiction in which one can find the promise of a
reshaping or refinement of the initial conception – as ‘negate’ it; as if it
were an internal necessity of our science, which is becoming ever more ‘civi-
lized’ or sophisticated, to be indefinitely contested, or even held in check –
albeit quietly, without fuss – by our experience, which is ever more discon-
certing and, in its own way, often discrete, ‘wilder’ than before. So much so
that one could just as well argue that the N.T.R. has become, as I once
heard it said, an anachronistic concept – insofar as it is deemed to be too
attached to the manifest, taking what is simply a moment in the process as
an absolute rejection – as the contrary, namely, that it is spreading through-
out the whole body of psychoanalysis in crisis.
It will be noticed at once that it is precisely in those circles where thera-
peutic concerns have been most prominent – in the United States, where the
title of ‘Dr’ is required by psychoanalysts for those wishing to practise
analysis – that this crisis, which, as we know, follows a period of success, is
the most visible: there is a preference for shorter and more efficient thera-
pies and, above all, therapies which promise positive results (adaptation,
feelings of well-being, fulfilment, creativity). So we are going through a time
of disaffection, of a negative reaction to psychoanalysis, and there is no
guarantee that in France, in spite of the apparent excitement, we shall be
preserved from it.
I said that it was rare to hear psychoanalysts speaking about the negative
therapeutic reaction today. When they do, it is generally: (1) to note the
state of impasse, and to give a wholly verbal explanation for the failure of a

1
Translated by Andrew Weller.
2
Third Conference of the European Federation of Psychoanalysis London, October 1979. The papers
presented at this Conference were published in the Bulletin (Volume 16) of the Federation. This article is
a reworked and enlarged version of my own paper.
3
Allusion to Freud’s (1915) text, A case of paranoia running counter to the theory of the disease.

Copyright © 2014 Institute of Psychoanalysis

534 J.-B. Pontalis

treatment; (2) and particularly when this failure occurs or, in the end,
becomes more pronounced; (3) to impute it to the patient: “If it went
wrong, it was because he did an N.T.R. on me”4 (just as a mother might
say of her child, who, in order to hold her back, obtain her love, arouse her
concern, or, why not, out of ill will, chooses to harm himself first).
While the analyst was justified in expecting the analysis, in view of the
work of elucidation accomplished, to result in a liberating change, in fact
it is the opposite that occurs: there is a return if not an aggravation of the
old symptoms, or even the development of new ones, a new upsurge of
conflicts, the proclamation of a permanent state of suffering: the worst is
always certain. . . The patient, it is said, ‘prefers’ to suffer than to be cured.
It might be better to consider that he does not want to exchange the total-
ity of his suffering, as if this ill were a personal asset, for even a partial
improvement which would represent for him, first and foremost, a
response to his analyst’s expectations, the satisfaction of his all too evident
wish, submission to his demand: “You must change”. Better to remain ill
than tomber gu
eri (lit. ‘fall cured’). The fall, or relapse, protects one from
loss.
We know that it is in a text that many regard as a ‘testament’ and as
continuing to define the framework of our current difficulties, that Freud
comes up against, and seems thoroughly discouraged by, “this force which
is defending itself by every possible means against recovery and which is
absolutely resolved to hold on to illness and suffering” (Freud, 1937, p.
242). All things considered, it seems as if he has come across something
stronger than analysis, which he evokes by resorting to a military metaphor:
“It seems as if victory is in fact as a rule on the side of the big battalions”
(p. 240). This is the Napoleon of Waterloo, and not the Bonaparte of the
battle of the Bridge of Arcole, who once observed, out of realism more than
pessimism: “The big battalions are always right”.
On the face of it, there is an admission of defeat here, almost a rout,
and, in any case, a note of renunciation which at first sight is surprising,
for Freud was not short of instruments to help him tame this force or, at
the very least, circumvent these big battalions. Let us recall some of the
main ones:
(1) The libidinal satisfaction found in the symptom – however distressing
the experience may be, however invalidating its consequences are – and
in the underlying fantasy, is recognized almost immediately, along with
the secondary and especially primary gain that is associated with it.
Every analysis is carried out on the basis of this presupposition
namely, that the secret jouissance can be heard and identified behind the
overt complaint.
(2) Correlatively, ‘flight into health’ is regarded as suspect, much more sus-
pect even than its symmetrical equivalent of ‘flight into illness’, which
has the advantage of attesting to the actualization of the conflict. Even
the patient’s wish to get better (and the analyst’s too, when he or she is
driven by ‘therapeutic zeal’) is worth investigating and analysing as a
4
Translator’s note: in French “il m’a fait un N.T.R”.

Int J Psychoanal (2014) 95 Copyright © 2014 Institute of Psychoanalysis

 No, twice no 535

symptom (see Nunberg, 1925). The first generation of psychoanalysts

was no doubt more attentive than we are – given that we see the admis-
sion of suffering as a necessary condition for embarking on an analysis
– to the ‘bonus of pleasure’ offered by the symptom. Analysts were
therefore more suspicious of the patient’s often overtly expressed wish
to be rid of it.
(3) Later, the new theorization of the sense of guilt, made possible by
the second topography of the agencies, offered a quasi-arithmetical
explanation of suffering – unpleasure for one system, the ego, plea-
sure for the other, the superego – and hence the possibility of defin-
ing the N.T.R. more precisely. Freud saw this as in indirect
expression of the ascendancy [emprise] exerted by the superego: “But
as far as the patient is concerned, this sense of guilt is dumb; it does
not tell him he is guilty; he does not feel guilty, he feels ill “ (Freud,
1923, p. 49–50).
(4) The economic perspective adopted to elucidate the paradox of masoch-
ism – of the pleasure found in pain, of the paradox, he “derives enjoy-
ment from his suffering” [“il jouit l u il souffre”] (Laplanche, 1971, p.
a o
177) – made it possible to take a further step forward: the masochist
seeks, at all costs – and this cost is sometimes very great – to maintain
a certain ‘amount of suffering’. He may then find that the analytic situ-
ation guarantees him this possibility; it becomes the locus of an intermi-
nable complaint or a cause lost in advance.
(5) Finally, the invocation of a ‘need for punishment’ not only points to
the other side of the sense of guilt but – in a movement of progressive
interiorization that is so characteristic of Freud’s thought (see Pontalis,
1977a) – to a reality inscribed in the register of the drives or, rather, in
the vital order. For Freud speaks here of need [Bed€ urfnis], not of drive
[Trieb]. The choice of the term is all the more significant in that, con-
trary to Jung and, subsequently, many Anglo-Saxon analysts – he
always refused to recognize the existence of any sort of natural impetus
towards development [Entwicklungstrieb] which makes it possible to
liken the complexity of the psyche to the progressive maturation of an
organism and which, consequently, founds the classical (pre-analytic)
idea of cure, namely, of re-establishing the supposed integrity, equilib-
rium and harmony of living organisms. On the contrary, what Freud
inscribes at the heart of human life is a force, and even an anti-life prin-
ciple: the scandal of the death drive, which is also that of the
unknown,5 of that which does not let itself be known, heard or grasped.
There is no control, no hold possible over that which exerts the most
powerful ascendancy over us.

5
We should remember these lines from Analysis terminable and interminable: “One portion of this force
has been recognized by us, undoubtedly with justice, as the sense of guilt and need for punishment, and
has been located by us in the ego’s relation to the superego. But this is only the portion of it which is,
as it were, psychically bound by the superego, and thus becomes recognizable; other quotas of the same
force, whether bound or free, may be at work in other unspecified places (1937, p. 242, author’s empha-
sis).

Copyright © 2014 Institute of Psychoanalysis Int J Psychoanal (2014) 95

536 J.-B. Pontalis

What does Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Freud, 1922) tell us? That if,
indeed, there is a ‘biological’ programme, the programme in question in no
way guarantees maturation or the production of the new, or even the
advent of more flexible or more differentiated structures, but essentially the
repetition of the same, oriented entirely by the mortal attraction of death.
Psychoanalysts have still not recovered from encountering the obstacle of
this law of return in their own field and no longer outside it in the form,
for instance, of a fate neurosis beyond the regulations that ensure the inter-
play of pleasure and unpleasure. What is at work here is what might be
called an agony principle of jouissance and pain. When such a principle
reigns, the laws of the libidinal and narcissistic economy which govern
ordinary neurotic functioning – laws that were basically taken over by
Freud from the liberal economy – cease to be valid. By the same token, it is
clear that, in terms of such a principle of jouissance/pain, obtaining a com-
promised cure no longer appears less ‘costly’ than the neurotic compromise.
Calculating the costs, or estimating the benefits, no longer comes into the
equation. “Never mind what it costs me or what it costs you”, certain
patients seem to tell us, “provided it lasts”. The logic of pleasure/unpleasure
seems to give way to, or be totally covered over by, a logic of despair –
which is disconcerting for our own logic, both that of primary and second-
ary processes.
Having made this brief survey, we are faced with the following paradox:
the more the theory seems capable of taking into account the N.T.R., the
better it is armed to overcome it; the more the N.T.R. disarms us, the more
it appears as an irreducible force, and even as an indivisible nucleus of
being, which not only escapes the powers of interpretation, but holds analy-
sis itself in check at its very roots and in its aims: analysis meets within
itself that which denies it. Its function is indeed to unbind representations,
but with a view to binding them differently (in this sense, it certainly takes
the side of Eros which, admittedly, is disconcerting, but with the aim of
producing more subtle concerts); or again, it aims to bring together repre-
sentation and affect where they are disconnected. But it now encounters, in
the negative, and, as if incarnated, this function of unbinding; the binding
between signs is now no more than a tie of hate, of love? it is no longer
clear between two bodies. But Eros is absent. We have crossed over to
the side of machines of destruction.
Freud knew how to recognize and decipher the symptom of those
‘wrecked by success’, just at the point when their (conscious) desire was
going to be satisfied. In fact, in his article of 1916, he refers to the cases of
two women, Lady Macbeth and Rebecca West, and what’s more, two sterile
women (Freud, 1916), a reference which may be seen as anticipatory if one
considers that the ‘bedrock’ on which the N.T.R. is ultimately based is pre-
cisely, in both sexes, a certain rejection of femininity. . . (see Freud, 1937).
Freud analyses this symptom with success and with the passion of a detec-
tive who is sure of thwarting the ruses of his adversary; but, strangely
enough, his analysis is based on cases of fiction, borrowed from drama-
turgy, so already represented by words and depicted by a dramatic action
(the oedipal scenario). When it is Freud himself who fails in his practice,
Int J Psychoanal (2014) 95 Copyright © 2014 Institute of Psychoanalysis
 No, twice no 537

when the analysis itself becomes sterile and is incapable of creating anything
new, well, then it is quite another matter.
There is thus a strange reversal at the very heart of Freud’s thought – a
reversal which almost invites us to put the question the other way round:
how can positive results, which are not in the end illusory, be obtained by
analysis? If one recognizes the death drive, as the late Freud encourages us
to do, as the very essence of drive functioning, then one might as well shut
up shop, as it was once said (lightly or heavily, it all depends) by the author
of Gu
erir avec Freud (Nacht, 1971).
But this reversal is also a return, a return, that is, to a medical way of
thinking which was apparently rehabilitated at the very moment of the fail-
ure of analysis in the face of success. The expression ‘negative therapeutic
reaction’, which Freud always places between inverted commas, as if it
were borrowed from another vocabulary than his own,6 reveals that this
“doctor in spite of himself” (Leo Stone’s phrase)7 was falling back on the
medical view of therapeutic aims which led him to ask the question: why
does the patient react negatively to a treatment that has been correctly pre-
scribed and is being properly conducted? As we have seen, there is no
shortage of answers, but Freud always plays down their significance. In
short, he only fully recognizes the ‘purposive aim’ of the doctor and the
patient they share the same aim, that of, recovery when it is radically
undermined.
Here we have Bichat’s famous formula in its inverted form: rather than
life being defined as the sum of the forces that resist death, it is death, in its
concrete form of an insistent repetition of the ‘demonic’, which resists life!
I have just used the term resistance. One is tempted, in venturing to
define the nature of the N.T.R., to draw on the distinction between defence
and resistance. This distinction is admittedly a difficult one to make in prac-
tice: the statements “he is defending himself”, “he is resisting”, are fre-
quently used as if they were equivalent. And yet it is theoretically
identifiable and operative. A resistance is aroused by the movement of the
analysis, whether it is external – cultural, philosophical, medical or psychiat-
ric resistance – or internal. There is resistance to, in, and as a result of the
analysis. In other words, even if the word was not invented by psychoanaly-
sis, the experience of the matter is specifically analytic enough to throw
light in return on phenomena pertaining to other fields. Defence is a biolog-
ical concept, transposed by pyschoanalysis from the organism to the psyche.
The outcome of this is:
(1) While the mechanisms of defence can be understood as habitual charac-
ter traits that are more or less well-integrated with the subject’s psychic
functioning,8 and, as such, are attributed to the individual, resistance is
6
I have not succeeded in establishing which current of the medicine of the time this expression was
linked to.
7
Translator’s note: with reference to Moliere’s (1661) comedy (Stone, 1961).
8
Cf. the following passage from Analysis terminable and interminable: “No one individual, of course,
makes use of all the mechanisms of defence. Each person uses no more than a selection of them. But
these become fixated in his ego. They become regular modes of reaction of his character, of institutions”
(p. 237, author’s emphasis).

Copyright © 2014 Institute of Psychoanalysis Int J Psychoanal (2014) 95

538 J.-B. Pontalis

the effect of a process to which the analyst and his patient, the patient
and his analyst, are both subject.
(2) Whereas defence, a mode of psychic functioning, is global and thus rela-
tively indifferent to what, in its singularity, triggers it, (there is a danger,
but what the danger is it does not know), a resistance is always selec-
tive, like repression.
(3) Insofar as it is opposed to the emergence of a representation or affect, a
resistance can be interpreted, and can only be interpreted, if the repre-
sentation and affect in question are designated by the analyst. On the
other hand, one does not interpret a defence; one notes it (even if it
may mean reinforcing it) or one brings it to light when it is uncon-
scious. There is no analysis, then, in the psychoanalytic sense of the
term – namely, unbinding of the representation and the thing signified –
but, in the best of cases, analysis in the Cartesian sense. What is called,
incorrectly, analysis of the mechanisms of defence, may facilitate
insight, ensure increased awareness of the patient’s psychic functioning,
but it cannot induce effects of meaning.
Now, what have we been witnessing and participating in for years now, if
not a growing assimilation of resistance to the defences? For it is a long his-
tory that I would readily trace back to Karl Abraham’s (1919) precursory
text denouncing “a particular form of neurotic resistance against the ana-
lytic method”.9 We see the strictly analytic interpretation of the motives of a
resistance swinging towards the objectification of the defences – this transi-
tion being facilitated by appealing to the notion of ‘permanent resistance’
or ‘resistance to the discovery of resistances’. We are thus drawing up an
ever larger and more refined inventory of the ‘personality types’ that might
by nature be refractory to analysis: character neuroses (Reichian ‘muscular
armour’), as if personalities, ‘basic fault’, ‘false self’, and so on. Note that it
is always in terms of deficit (paucity of fantasy, lack of psychic elaboration,
etc.) that these structures are apprehended. And the list gets longer day by
day: think of Joyce McDougall’s ‘anti-analysands’ or Nathalie Zaltzmann’s
‘untreatables’ or, more recently, the ‘parasitic analysands’, who can neither
give nor receive, described by Micheline Enriquez. Now as, at the same
time, it is constantly being drummed into us that classical indications can
no longer be found, and, moreover, that if we were to come across them,
they would turn out to be a source of the worst disillusionments, it is diffi-
cult to see what could suit us. But isn’t this simply a failure to recognize the
fact that the only effective analysis, that is to say, an analysis which also
engages the analyst’s unconscious, is one which takes us to the limits, test-
ing both the limits of analysis and our own limits? Analysts, moreover, need
to be persuaded of this, since it is only their ‘difficult cases’, their ‘impossi-
ble cases’ that provide them with material to work on, theorize and write
about: analysts agree on this point: perhaps such cases even enable them to

9
I say ‘precursory’ because many of the traits with which contemporary psychoanalysis is credited have
already been traced with a sure hand by Abraham: apparent submission to the fundamental rule, identi-
fication with the analyst in the place of transference, defiance, envy and, above all, narcissism.

Int J Psychoanal (2014) 95 Copyright © 2014 Institute of Psychoanalysis

 No, twice no 539

experience as analysts what they did not encounter as patients during the
entire course of their own analysis.
The current multiplication of clinical pictures would not be too serious if
it did not risk producing the following effect: when we attribute our dis-
couragement or our helplessness to a morphology of the psychic reality of
our patients, we are behaving like those among them who impute their state
of inner misery to a social or familial reality which is too much like this or
not enough like that. So we all defend ourselves by referring to reality
whether it is qualified as psychic or material, social or corporal, does not
change anything at all, from the moment we refer to the said reality as if it
were a cause. We remain under the influence or sway of the causal discourse
from which the psychoanalytic method had to break away in order to find
its own path.
Let us return now to the N.T.R, which, in fact, I had not lost sight of
while I was speaking about the reaction of analysts faced with those who
succeed in thwarting their method with a ‘no’. Today, the specificity of the
notion seems to have been lost. Having being recognized everywhere, it can
no longer be located anywhere. It no longer designates anything. It no
longer specifies an identifiable psychic event. Even analyses which end in
what is considered as a failure will be more readily understood in relation
to the particularities of the transference and countertransference – a hypoth-
esis that is often confirmed by a second analysis – than as a negative thera-
peutic reaction.
So is the concept N.T.R., which refers to a diversity of psychic organiza-
tions, includes heterogeneous psychic movements without accounting for
them or discriminating them, and, above all, accentuates the slippage I have
noted from resistance to defence, a bad one? Should it be discarded?
And yet the repeated emergence of a term in Freud’s work, over an
extended period of his thinking,10 cannot leave us indifferent. Could it be
that, when he seems to admit defeat in the face of the force of what he calls
the negative therapeutic reaction, Freud had ‘forgotten’ one of his very first
definitions of resistance: “That with which the patient clings to his disease
and, in so doing, fights against his own recovery” (1905, p. 261)? This defi-
nition is all the more remarkable in that it is used to indicate the superiority
of the analytic method over hypnosis which spares itself the ordeal of resis-
tance. Now the terms of this definition are the very same ones that he
would use later on to speak of the N.T.R. Was he in fact employing the
same terms to speak about something else? Let us apply to the theory the
golden rule of the method: an obstacle, a contradiction or a forgetting, a
‘negative experience’, is a sign of . . . what? For the moment, let us say,
generally, that it is a sign of something that has been kept at bay, and
which, because it is not really included in the ‘theoretical envelope’,11 then
makes its return massively in the body of analysis. With the negative
therapeutic reaction, as much in the theory as in the treatment, resistances
are massive.
10
The expression ‘negative reaction’ can be found as early as 1910 in the ‘Rat Man’.
Francßois Gantheret’s expression.
11

Copyright © 2014 Institute of Psychoanalysis Int J Psychoanal (2014) 95

540 J.-B. Pontalis

Negative therapeutic reaction: a single expression consisting of three

terms which are always placed side by side. Each of these three terms has
its own (long) history and its own (heavy) semantic weight. It will be useful
to begin by separating them: if we dismember the notion, we may have a
chance of dismantling the thing itself.
Let us dwell for a moment on the word ‘reaction’. Jean Starobinski
(1974) has shown that that it was a term that was introduced quite recently.
Action/passion was the pair of opposites which had prevailed until the 17th
century, whereafter the use of the term reaction quickly became common
currency with the acceptance of the idea of the interdependence of all
things. As no action escapes an action in return, the result, Starobinski
writes, is that “the ontological privilege whereby an agent is more noble
than a patient is erased . . . the agent will suffer in its turn. Passivity and
activity are both transitory” (1974, p. 20). We know that Newton would
formulate this global intuition of the interdependence of things in quantita-
tive language: “Every action has an equal and opposite action”. Or again:
“The mutual actions of two bodies upon each other are always equal in
magnitude and opposite in direction” (cited by Starobinski).
With the very wide extension that the term reaction had for a time in the
field of medicine, we have ended up forgetting that ‘re-acting’ is a response
to an earlier ‘act’. They form a pair: one that is much more closely associ-
ated than that of action and passion, and which conveys images of reciproc-
ity, symmetry and unmediated interaction. We are no longer concerned here
with a pair of opposites (passion = logical contrary of action) but with a
‘compensating or balanced pair’, both terms of which obey the same logic.
To get a better feel for the resonance of the word ‘reaction’ in the Freudian
semantic field, just think of Reaktionsbildung [reaction formation], of Abre-
agieren [abreaction, which is simply a deferred reaction coming from the
inside to the action of the trauma coming from the outside], or again of
transference defined as a mode of Agieren [acting out] and of countertrans-
ference as a reaction to the transference. The model is the same in each of
these cases.
My initial and elementary remark is that when a reaction is identified in
the treatment, even in a minor way (“He reacted to my interpretation, to
my absence by. . .” or, on the analyst’s side, “I find his strident voice exas-
perating, and his silence overwhelming”), it is an indication that the analyst
is preceived or sees himself as an agent, that his function as an interpreter,
as a support for the transference becomes blurred; or, vice versa, that the
analysand, regardless of the things he or she may say, is completely occu-
pied with exerting an active force on, and generally against, the analyst in
person. We are then in the register of acting out, even if this acting out is
only sustained by words. This dimension of the effect of the discourse on
the psyche and on the analyst’s body is without doubt present in every
analysis. It is even necessary, to my mind, but on condition that it is not
prevalent and, more particularly, that it serves as a platform for psychic
elaboration. But what is there to elaborate when the whole analytic relation
is reduced to a power struggle? Where the ‘big battalions advance’, freedom
of thought exits. One copes the best one can.
Int J Psychoanal (2014) 95 Copyright © 2014 Institute of Psychoanalysis
 No, twice no 541

It is a finding of common experience that the patients who are most

refractory to the movement of analysis – a movement of which free associa-
tion is but a sign, and not always the most reliable – are the ones who
invest the reality of the analytic relationship most intensely as well as the
the analyst’s actual physical presence. In the infantile history of these
patients – where there is a paucity of memories and and reviviscences – one
mainly finds words or utterances that have been proffered, most often by
the mother. These utterances have the significance of acts. They are experi-
enced as irrevocable verdicts, decrees received as denials of justice, and are
not susceptible to any sort of modification that would relativize them or,
more importantly, relativize the image and the power of the person who
uttered them. Being absolute, they are bound to provoke a reaction in
return. So it is not uncommon to see such patients acting out somatically or
outside the analytic setting. The utterances of the mother and the analyst
are denounced through acts.
In these cases, the transference was quite rightly placed by Freud under
the heading of Agieren. But should we speak of transference when it ceases
to be a metaphor, when there is no longer any mobility of representations
but rather a relationship to the object in which all the subject’s psychical
energy seems to be invested? The transferential relationship is then extre-
mely intense. It is stretched to the extreme, stretched to breaking point, with
sudden and violent fluctuations of feelings: admiration and scorn, gratitude
and rejection. Everything is black or white, without nuances. One is not
bored with these patients, but one suffers. One’s ‘motor’ ticks over very
slowly or quickly without ever settling into a cruising speed. . . And the
countertransference also expresses itself in a form of Agieren: one’s body is
permeated with a diffuse sense of tension, and this physical immobilization
is accompanied by a paralysis of the flow of thought processes. Attention
no longer ‘floats’: it is focused, paralysed, as if subject to a prohibition.12
Action/reaction: the pair is functioning flat out. Rather than the possibil-
ity of exchange and a circulation of energy, what dominates is mutual con-
trol and vigilance. The drive for mastery alone seems to be operating: who
will become the master of the other? What was excluded at the origins of
psychoanalysis seems, does it not, to be making a return? It is as if one has
been taken back to the time of suggestion and counter-suggestion, of imme-
diate action, when transference and transmission of thoughts – the same
€
word, Ubertragung – tend to become indistinguishable, in a sort of transfu-
sion of energies.
The expression positive therapeutic reaction cannot be found in Freud’s
work. I see this as an indication that a reaction with regard to the
requirements of psychoanalytic working-through, of the work of a thinking
apparatus cannot in his eyes be positive. I also see it as a reminder of
what everyone will readily agree on, namely, that therapeutic gains, how-
ever necessary and desirable they may be, cannot be separated from the
process of intrapsychic change brought about by analysis.

12
For a fuller description of this state, already noted by Ferenczi, see Pontalis, 1974.

Copyright © 2014 Institute of Psychoanalysis Int J Psychoanal (2014) 95

542 J.-B. Pontalis

Let us take stock: the negative therapeutic reaction, which is an effect of

massive resistance to this process of change, takes on the appearance of a
global, quasi-organic defence, and then appears to be untreatable. But,
unless we submit or give up, that is to say, unless we make the patient’s sys-
tem our own and, by obeying its law, submit to the powerful sway it has
over him, it will be fitting to ask the following questions: what is the active
fantasy involved in this defence in which the pair action/reaction play a pre-
valent role? What is the hidden illusion, or rather conviction? What affects
are mobilized?
In a very fine article, Joan Riviere (1936) shows how the patients in
whom she observed an N.T.R. were completely driven by a desire – I would
say, rather, a compulsive ego need – to repair, to find a remedy for. . . They
refused to ‘get better themselves’ in a sort of spirit of self-sacrifice, as long
as they had not ‘healed’ their internal primary objects. Such a task, more-
over, seemed inexhaustible, as their love and hatred for these objects are so
intense and intertwined. Whether or not one adheres to the author’s Klei-
nian conceptions, she had a powerful intuition here. In his article on the
countertransference, and more particularly in the chapter entitled ‘The
patient as therapist to his analyst”, Harold Searles (1975) formulates it in a
more radical way when he recognizes, among the most powerful forces that
drive us, an “essentially therapeutic tendency”. He sees the patient’s illness
as the expression of an unconscious attempt to heal the analyst. Concerning
the problem I am discussing with here, I would be inclined to suggest that
the motivating force behind the negative therapeutic reaction is a mad pas-
sion to change, to heal, the mad mother within oneself.
The analysis of Fabienne was situated from beginning to end under the sign
of the negative therapeutic reaction, that is to say, under the triple sign of the
‘reaction’, ‘therapeutics’, and the ‘no’. The image of the barrel of the Danaids
– the very banality of which reinforces our discouragement – or of Sisyphus’
rock, which is evocative of punishment, effort and returning to the point zero,
will inevitably come to mind here. On the other hand, the image of Penelope
toiling away, which would at least assure us that the Freudian metaphor of
the craft of weaving remains, in principle, active, is no longer valid.
Each time Fabienne feels an impulse to free herself from the limitless
sway of the maternal imago over her, it elicits in response the need to suffer
and make others suffer. For Fabienne, hurting, experiencing and denounc-
ing pain is a vital condition, not for the sake of enjoyment – jouissance is
the monopoly of the mother – but, more simply, just to exist. It is worth
recalling the definition Sartre gives in No exit [Huis clos, 1944] of spiteful-
ness (assimilated too quickly by psychoanalysts with sadism): “Needing the
suffering of others to feel one exists”. Does the paradox of the ‘bad object’
not reside in the fact that it is always available, can never be permanently
lost, and, as a result, is less likely than the good object to draw the subject
into experiencing its loss? Being indestructible, the bad object guarantees
the subject his own permanence.
Thinking of Fabienne, and others, I would not speak of identification
here, a term that would be too weak, implying as it does a minimum of dis-
tance and play between two subjects. Rather I would speak of possession by
Int J Psychoanal (2014) 95 Copyright © 2014 Institute of Psychoanalysis
 No, twice no 543

an internal foreign body which is constantly intrusive, relentlessly violent,

and exerts its mastery from within, as if the mother were a substitute for the
drive; hence, in return, the furious effort, also unceasing and without respite,
to ‘possess’ this foreign body, to control it, by placing it outside. I would like
to put forward the following hypothesis: if the Bem€ achtigungstrieb – the
drive for mastery, which aims to get hold of the object like some kind of
prey – appears to be ‘non-sexual’, pertaining to the vital order, is it not
because the sexual drive has, as it were been confiscated by the prevalent
internal object? And if the subject can only react, is it not because he assigns,
once and for all, the place of agent, of actor, to a parental figure that is at
the origin. . . of everything? Helplessness is always the admission that omnip-
otence is in the other who keeps it for himself, and even must possess it for-
ever. Faced with this omnipotence, with this permanent excitation, with this
excess of mother in oneself, the only response possible is one of reaction.
At this juncture, it is worth considering what for a long time was held by
medicine of vitalist inspiration as the privilege of life: living beings would
succumb to attacks from the outside if they did not have within them a per-
manent principle of reaction. And let us note in passing the ambiguity that
is attached, at least in French, to the combination of these three terms nega-
tive-therapeutic-reaction. In addition to the usual sense the N.T.R. has of
refusing to get better, one can also hear another sense which attributes a
therapeutic effect to the reaction itself: the idea of a reaction that is salutary
for the organism insofar as it gets a grip on itself, that is to say, it struggles
to free itself from the sway of the other – and asserts its own individual-
ity.13 No one has been able to show more powerfully than the author of
Mars (Zorn, 1976) the extreme form to which this necessity of saying ‘no’
can lead. The entire trajectory followed by Fritz Zorn could be condensed
into two propositions: “I don’t think I ever learnt the word ‘no’ from my
parents . . . what was really necessary was to say yes” (p. 33); and “Cancer-
ous tumours do not hurt in themselves; it is the healthy organs, which are
compressed by the cancerous tumours, that hurt. I think the same thing
applies to the sickness of the soul: wherever it hurts, it is me” (p. 205).14
Enacting no precedes saying no but sometimes it comes too late. And
the ‘no’ must precede the ‘yes’.
With Fabienne, interpretation had an effect of disjunction, of rupture,
that was clearer and more physical than with other patients. Which is why,
even if its immediate meaning could be accepted, its significance had to be
swiftly diminished, or even nullified. Interpretation in itself – insofar as it
was meaning provided by a third party – introduced a gap into her exces-
sively close tie with her mother, a gap that she reduced by treating what the
analyst said as equivalent to a repetition of her mother’s words, whether
spoken or latent. It acted as a bar to what I have called elsewhere, not so

13
I sometimes find that my patients – and, for that matter, my colleagues too – are singularly non-reac-
tive in their willingness to comply with the fundamental rule and with what the analyst says, or in sub-
mitting to the code of the Master.
14
My emphasis. These words condense the remarks I made in my article Sur la douleur psychique
(Pontalis, 1977b).

Copyright © 2014 Institute of Psychoanalysis Int J Psychoanal (2014) 95

544 J.-B. Pontalis

much a ‘symbiotic relation’, assumed to be without conflict (whereas, in

fact, struggle and quarrels are permanent), as incest between psychical
apparatuses seeking to get the better of each other, to possess each other
respectively: a coupling of what is at once feared and desired – jouissance
and pain – in fascination. So every interpretation risked being understood
as an imminent rupture of her tie to (to and not with) her mother, and
with the analyst as object. It is sometimes the case that all ‘progress’ is
seen as anticipating an irremediable separation, a shipwreck in which all
hands have been lost. Terminable analysis is, for some, the end of every-
thing.
Outwardly, Fabienne was ‘altruistic’ in the face of all testing situations:
unmarried mothers (the real father is pushed aside), suffering infants,
friends undergoing a breakdown15 (depression as a ‘reaction’ to breaking-
up), sick bodies and souls. . ., all by herself she was an SOS agency for the
banished and victims of all kinds, a defence committee for just causes –
albeit without being motivated by political, religious or ethical convictions.
No, her convictions lay elsewhere. Reality has to be taken care of; only
reality has this right, and therefore has absolute priority. But this reality,
Fabienne knows – and herein lies the contradiction – is incurable. With its
endless misery and horror, it will always have the final word. Reality lays
down the law. Necessity lays down the law. Fabienne then just has to
react immediately to events. She has to feel solicited by the outside world,
like a doctor in an emergency department, in order to decide what needs
to be done. There is no messianism in her, no active rescue fantasy. What
could be called her ‘therapeutic obstinacy’ – for which doctors who imag-
ine they can vanquish death are sometimes reproached – is triggered by
the extreme difficulty, or even impossibility of success. Wanting to cure
everything is a reaction – a reaction, not a response – to “letting people
die”.
Now for quite a while in her analysis – and, only in her analysis, I
think, this intelligent, generous and active woman who, contrary to what
she gave one to believe, was efficient in all her undertakings, showed quite
a different face, one of obstinacy, bitterness, and mistrust. She was no
longer generous. Fabienne was uncompromising. She had come into analy-
sis, she said, to find “the right to speak” (it was fashionable at the time,
but these words were true for her). It seemed to justify her inhibitions at
work, her inability to verbalize often intense emotions, along with a per-
meability to the things other people said (“I’m a sponge that absorbs
everything, without a filter”). It was only much later that I understood
that she had come into analysis to find – and, at the same time to refuse
– another, more fundamental right, that of treating herself well, the possi-
bility of being a caring mother for herself. For her, gaining access to the
pleasure of living depended on this.
In line with the views of Joan Riviere, I would suggest that the N.T.R. is
never so manifest as with subjects in whom the category of therapeuin – car-
ing, treating, curing, three terms that ought really to be differentiated – is
15
Translator’s note: in English in the original.

Int J Psychoanal (2014) 95 Copyright © 2014 Institute of Psychoanalysis

 No, twice no 545

prominent, with, as a corollary, a massive repression of sexuality. Basically,

perhaps these patients are asking us to cure them of ineducable, uncurable
sexuality, which for them, as in the perversions, is loaded with envy and
violence. (And, undeniably, when faced with a negative therapeutic reaction,
the analyst comes across perversion, with its defiance, its monotony, its
secret hatred – but perversion displaced from the sexual domain to the vital
order.) Rather than measuring themselves with the madness of Eros, they
choose the struggle lost in advance with Thanatos. Being cured of sexuality,
curing the excess of mother, not wanting to get better, is all one and the
same thing.
However, under and through the negativity, one could also detect a for-
midable hope for change – for a ‘new birth’ – even a parthogenetic birth
facilitated by the analyst/mother, even though the means of the treatment
were ruthlessly criticized: the ‘ritual’ of the sessions, their unvariable length,
the quietness of the room, and the impassiveness of the priest in charge.
And yet how intolerant she was when it came to the slightest change, for
instance, if the analyst received her slightly late or if some new element was
introduced into the visual field. At the same time, she would insist that the
analyst should change his technique of which he was the slave: “Oh! If only
you were Winnicott. . .” One particular fact deserves attention and that is
the way she disparaged language, that is to say, the very medium of analy-
sis; furious disparagement which could go as far as making a frank accusa-
tion, as far as an expression of hatred, and, in any case, which went beyond
ordinary comments on the inadequacy of language and experience. Now, as
I have said, words, their very literalness, their immobility, like tattoos or
marks on the body, were over-invested with an intensity that was equal to
her rejection of language on account of its potential for creating and dis-
placing meaning. With the difference that while words remain, and maintain
the maternal claustrum, language moves, or can, indirectly, create move-
ment.
The only change recognized as valid would be a change in external real-
ity. The curious thing is that we are sometimes persuaded, for a while at
least, that this is true, telling ourselves: “With a mother like that who is so
psychotic, unpredictable, incoherent, abusive, and persecutory”, or with
“such a deficient ‘early environment’ or after such a series of disasters and
catastrophes, what else can one do but try and repair, stick patches over,
the holes in the fabric?”
Let us not jump to the conclusion that we are then no longer doing
analysis. First of all, because every interpretation, even if it is not its pur-
pose, can have a reparative effect. Secondly, because an increasing number
of analysts, from a wide variety of horizons, and irrespective of the particu-
lar school they belong to, are increasingly looking for (and hence, of course,
finding) the aetiology of psychic troubles in the reality of an infantile situa-
tion, and, what is more, under the growing influence of child psychoanalysis
taken as a model of reference. However possible it is to criticize this orien-
tation, when it does not criticize itself, it is a real indication that the psychic
space in which we move, that of the mobility of representations, requires, in
order to constitute itself and to come alive, a sort of basis or anchoring in a
Copyright © 2014 Institute of Psychoanalysis Int J Psychoanal (2014) 95
546 J.-B. Pontalis

‘good enough’ reality.16 Lastly, it seems to me that we cannot avoid letting

the patient, whom reality has ferociously mistreated, know, in one way or
another, that we recognize the violence that that has been done to him or
her. Any intervention on our part which more or less insinuated, for
instance: “You felt /you imagined/you projected that your mother was like
that” would merely repeat and thereby authenticate the original verdict:
you are not saying what you think you are saying, you are what I say. We
can lead our patients towards the other meaning, repressed or disregarded,
of their ‘experience’. We cannot disqualify their being.
I do not think I am overlooking here the defensive function of the appeal
to reality to which I was referring above. But neither should we forget its
symmetrical counterpart: the ‘defensive use of fantasy’ (Lagache) or ‘fanta-
sying’ (Winnicott) which impedes representative activity from taking shape,
that is to say, reality. I concede that there is nothing that has occurred in
external reality, no trauma, however ‘cumulative’ it is said to be (Khan,
1963), which in itself justifies the persistance of its effects in the present.
And that, conversely, the subject can make use of the slightest fragment of
reality to weave his web of fantasy and catch us in it or form his cocoon
and imprison himself in it. What I have in mind here is not the defensive
use of reality, for with the patients I am thinking of it is a question of mak-
ing reality act, bringing it to bear in the present of the situation. Reality
assumes the function of insistence, generally attributed to the id, when it
occupies in this way the whole field of fantasy and representation: it is real-
ity which, repeatedly, says insane things. The ego is then nothing more than
a reaction to this reality, a negative reaction to a supposed full positivity, a
figure of Evil. The demonic is outside, an absolute power. The capacity for
day-dreaming is impossible for someone who likens external reality to a
nightmare. And what are we to make of the ‘vicissitudes of the drives’ when
it is the force of destiny that seems to contain within itself all the force of
the drives? Projection outside carries out simultaneously a sort of reversal
into the opposite. The world is against me; I can only be against the world.
To return once again to Mars. As we know, this autobiographical
account has resonated deeply with its readers. This is because it represents,
in a straightforward manner, with icy pathos and rigorous monotony, the
powerful influence of a conviction erected as an explanation: the destruction
of the very possibility of any form of desire. The term autobiography is
thus singularly inapposite: there can be no ‘auto’ in this erasure of the ‘I’,
and no life history, when nothing can happen which is not the consequence
of a programme and a ‘style of writing’ that is necessarily lacklustre. That
life, that death, can only be recorded.
Literary works that portray the captivating power exerted by one desiring
subject over another have always had their fascination. To take a relatively

16
Winnicott’s terms the ‘good enough mother’ or the ‘good enough environment’ do not signify in any
way an appeal to the good mother, as those who turn up their noses at the expression which they
assume is naive believe. In fact, good enough or bad enough is one and the same thing. Winnicott is not
Melanie Klein. His whole problematic aims even at rejecting the Kleinian manichaeistic conception of
the good and the bad object. “It’s good enough for me” means: “I don’t need anything more, that’s suits
me fine”.

Int J Psychoanal (2014) 95 Copyright © 2014 Institute of Psychoanalysis

 No, twice no 547

recent example, think of the Story of O,17 and of how far we have come, if
I may say so, over the last 20 years or so. For, with Mars, it is no longer a
question of seduction, of that subtle act of deception which implies a certain
complicity, whereby one of the partners employs all his genius to make the
other the actor of his own scenario, while making the seduced partner
believe that he/she is fulfilling his/her own secret desire. There is nothing
either that is evocative of the refined techniques of torture and confession,
of the rape of bodies and minds, which turn the victim into his own execu-
tioner. No, there is nothing of the kind in Fritz Zorn’s work. The parents,
who have to be incriminated in order to hold someone responsible, do not
want anything. The ‘golden bank’ of the lake of Zurich does not want any-
thing, neither the ‘bourgeoisie’ nor the system. No indoctrination, no visible
violence. The process of putting to death is carried out silently, by death
itself. So it is no longer only the ‘assassinated mind’ or the ‘soul murder’ of
President Schreber who is becoming the hero of our time or ‘psychic
murder’, notions invoked increasingly by psychoanalysts as if, in their turn,
they have bought into the construction of their patients. In the end it is
death in the body, the body assassinated after the soul has died, and this is
because the child has been killed (anonymously, like death or a society).
For Zorn, there is no doubt: his coming into the world was a putting to
death. But – and this is the strength of the book which, otherwise, would be
nothing but a psychopathological or sociological document – the appear-
ance of the cancer is also the appearance of an ‘I’: at last, he exists. Admit-
tedly, the author begins by telling us, curiously, that he has “caught”
cancer, because he needs so much to believe and convince us that all evil
comes from a persecuting external world. But as the book progresses (inso-
far as one can perceive a movement in its deliberate stagnation), the internal
foreign body, at first a mere internalization of Evil, becomes increasingly
what helps Zorn to live, giving him finally the feeling of having something
of his own, something that is him. Let me cite these words once again:
“Everywhere where it hurts, it’s me”.
Could this be the motive force of the N.T.R?? Apparently, with Mars, we
are poles apart from the cases I was referring to above. There is no excess
of mother here, no inflicted trauma, no noisy conflicts, no scenes; and yet,
it is an excess which is constantly and ruthlessly denounced: an excess of
nothing. After all, one dies more surely from asphyxiation than from blows.
Why does Fritz Zorn’s discourse – for it is a discourse, and even an
extraordinarily coherent one in which there is never a sign of the slightest
weakness – exert such a powererful influence over its readers – an influence
which reproduces, through the lucidity of ironic despair, the totalitarian
influence, Swiss-style, which he claims he has been subjected to? We are ana-
lysts, who are so quick to specify this or that discourse as being organized
by a specific logic, for instance, that of the obsessional or of the paranoiac,
convinced that it could only be like that and not otherwise: is it the triumph,
this time, of logic? It is because the systematic denunciation of mastery does
not leave us any better off than the one who makes himself a martyr of it.
17
Translator’s note: L’Histoire d’O, published in 1954 by the French author Anne Declos.

Copyright © 2014 Institute of Psychoanalysis Int J Psychoanal (2014) 95

548 J.-B. Pontalis

The best proof of what I am advancing, Zorn seems to be telling us, is that I
can only say what I am saying: I have been made what I am so totally that I
have not been left a word, or allowed a thought, to say or think differently.
I am entirely what others have made of me. I have been reduced to that.
And you would like me to scream! Mars, or the story of cold possession.
Here, the psychoanalyst’s classical weapon, the invitation to return to
oneself (“Look at the part that you are playing in this misfortune, or this
infamy, or this disorder”), no longer has currency: in the self, there is only
the Other. We have lost the power of the exorcist who also believed in
possession. We do not believe either that one can fabricate non-desire or
that the desire to destroy desire which we call self-destruction can be fabri-
cated. Finally, we think that negation, that the ‘no’ is in the first place
rejection, expulsion outside, thus completely sustained by the desire for a
desire without limits. “The original pleasure-ego wants to introject into
itself everything that is good and to eject from itself eveything that is bad”
(Freud, 1925, p. 237). That is pure Freud! But what if it is the bad, the
extraneous, the outside that is introjected? Well, that is pure Melanie
Klein!18
A solution that is not a compromise would perhaps be this: in this pri-
mary introjection of what is ‘bad’ there is a desire to appropriate oneself
and to control the stranger; the subject makes his own what by nature
escapes him, he eats the unknown (and so gets devoured by it). Let us go a
step further step and suggest that it is in the fantasy of the ‘primal scene’ –
unelaborated and indefinitely maintained – that this ‘primordial’ badness,
this definitive unknown is condensed. The subject excludes, but within him-
self, that from which he is excluded. The drive for mastery is never so pre-
valent as in the situation where this reversal has occurred. It is only so
apparently non-sexual because it identifies the sexual with a ‘no’.
Whence the question once again: what is it that the ‘negativists’ do not
want to give up? Is it really the suffering which mobilizes all their energy
and places, when all is said and done, the negative therapeutic reaction in
the field of masochism? Let us just say that they do not want to lose, which
is to be understood in two senses here: not losing the object and not being
losers. As I have already said, one is struck by their compelling need to
make the other change, to make him bend. And, on the horizon, this other
is always the mother, an inflexible mother with her ‘no’, with her: “You
have never been, and never will be, the cause of my desire. You may have
been the object of my love and of my aggression, of my demands and my
rejections, of my care or my negligence. We may even belong to each other,
and forever. I have a hold over you and you have a hold over me, but there
is nothing in you that can make me lose my mind.”
It is clear that such a discourse is not proffered at any given moment or
in any of its terms. But it is constantly acted, shown, attested. From this
perspective, the N.T.R. would be the subject’s saying no, while making it

18
It has to be recognized that the Kleinians were almost exclusively the only ones to speak about the
negative therapeutic reaction. Apart from the article by Joan Riviere already cited, see H. Rosenfeld
(1975).

Int J Psychoanal (2014) 95 Copyright © 2014 Institute of Psychoanalysis

 No, twice no 549

his own, to this acted no of the mother, of refusing her ‘betrayal’,19 and of
retaining the hope of making her bend. That is why the analyst seems in
this case to be functioning as a closed system and to be repeating an impos-
sible maternal incest, which has never taken place. “Je t’aime, moi non plus”
[“I love you, me neither”].
You will have understood that I do not place all the analyses that ‘do
not work’ under the heading of the N.T.R. Indeed, it is clear that each neu-
rotic organization can only react to that which claims to modify its equilib-
rium with a resistance of inertia. There is no reason for us to invoke, any
more than Freud does, an N.T.R. to justify all our failures and all our dis-
appointments. Each one loves his neurosis, and very often is only loved on
account of it a neurosis that consists of the refusal of a lack of satisfac-
tion and which does not admit the disillusionment of love. Each one of us
prefers it in any case. . . to the rest. It is no longer a question of inertia but
of a force that is suffered and exerted: the mastery of the ‘no’.
As a notion, the N.T.R. signals, through each of its terms, as I believe I
established at the beginning of this article, the return into the theoretical
field of what is excluded or put between parentheses by psychoanalysis: act-
ing out, the urgent need to cure. As for the ‘work of the negative’, which is
inherent to thought and language and which begins as soon as there is rep-
resentation of the ‘thing itself’, we see it substituted by, as if it occupied the
whole field, a ‘no’ erected as a an absolute or, if you like, the death drive
in its pure state. No doubt the whole question of the N.T.R. should be
taken up again, more clearly than has been the case so far, in relation to
the Verneinung, in order to understand what can bring the process of nega-
tion to a standstill: how can the acquisition of the ‘symbol’ of negation
which endows “thinking with a first measure of freedom from the conse-
quences of repression” (Freud, 1925, p. 239) become fixed, for example, in
negativism?
As an event the negative therapeutic reaction calls for an appreciation
which can assume varied forms. When it appears as a phenomenon punctu-
ating the analysis and particularly interpretation, it can be an indication of
the mobilization of the conflict, in the actuality of the moment of the
treatment. One could equally well speak here of a negative response of
the type, “I hadn’t thought of that!”, which furnishes Freud with his
argument as of reaction. An interpretation that hits the mark hurts, as
the analyst who remains confident in analysis, who can tolerate the negative
transference, and is not too afraid of aggressivity, will tell himself.
But when the negative therapeutic reaction defines electively the patient’s
psychic behaviour – and it is this form that interests me – the register
changes: our topographical differentiations are no longer applicable, our
interpretations seem futile (“we interpret for our own benefit and not for
theirs”, Freud notes), our analytic function is reduced to that of a used
object, generally as a whipping boy. In short, at each moment we experience
the limits of analysis and its power, and thus of our own. But in this ordeal,

19
See the text by Gabrielle Dorey, Entre le deuil et la trahison, la femme (1982) which stresses the decisive
and permanent impact on the destiny of a woman of this ‘no’ of the mother.

Copyright © 2014 Institute of Psychoanalysis Int J Psychoanal (2014) 95

550 J.-B. Pontalis

what else are we doing than taking over in our own name the identification
with the aggressor by means of which our patient has constructed (and
destroyed?) himself? Unwittingly, we make our own his own aim to exercise
power and control, his belief that other people made him what he is, his
demand that the only things that counts is “changing the unchangeable”,
“curing the uncurable”, all the rest being empty words. To someone who
has only been able to inscribe the words of the Other in his flesh, without
ever managing to invent himself, it will always seem that we are just
employing fine words.20 And for him, all money is false. We therefore have
to pay differently.
Moreover, at the theoretical level, we have the tendency to fall back on a
biological model and to overlook the fact that it is only a metaphor that
the patient imposes on us: the metaphor of a body–ego exclusively con-
cerned with defending itself against the intrusion of a menacing outside
world, exhausting itself in its attempts to seal the gaps opened up by the
penetration of external stimuli, and functioning in a purely reactive mode.
Now by succumbing in this way to the influence of such a self-representa-
tion, which asserts itself by refusing any possibility of analysis, we prevent
ourselves from having any access to the dimension of fantasy. For it is in
one and the same movement that: (1) the unconscious falls back on the ego
or on its correlate, external reality; (2) the analytic on the biological or the
social; and (3) the text on the envelope.
And yet, if we want to retain some hope of traversing with our patient
the arid land, the dried up and sterile desert of this inner world (even
though he insists on protecting it) which could become his inner space, it
seems to me that we must recognize fully the legitimacy of his negative reac-
tion; that is to say, we must accept our shortcomings, a ‘not enough’ which
is the only possible response to a ‘too much’. When we manage to give this
inner space, which is not a mere reduplication of the space outside, shape
and limits, to construct it without intruding on it,21 we discover that it is
pervaded and torn apart by forces which ought to be capitalized here as in
medieval allegorical paintings: Envy, Pride, Hate Voracity, Fear, Vengeance,
Grief. . . or, in our modern allegory, Reparation, Omnipotence, Phallus, Pri-
mal Scene. . . all inflexible word-things, word-passions. Yes, far from being
a desert, it is a territory that has been occupied since the dawn of time. The
N.T.R. appears then as resistance, but this time, in the vital, quasi-heroic
sense of the term, in the face of one who asserts that he is merely concerned
for our well-being, whereas all we are asking for is to breathe freely.
It is simply that there are mothers – and analysts as well – whom we need
to believe are really irresistible, and who need to believe this, too. How can
one fail to obstinately resist analysis which – and one senses this right from
the start – gives the illusion of reunion with the object, of its timeless pos-
session, only to bring about separation? Analysis is neither ‘reactive’, an
inverted figure of the drive, nor reactionary, furious terror in the face of the

20
Translator’s note : in French, “nous nous payons de mots”, which leads to the word play which follows,
“il faut donc que nous payions autrement”.
21
Which Fritz Zorn, who does not let anyone to approach him at all, does not allow us to do.

Int J Psychoanal (2014) 95 Copyright © 2014 Institute of Psychoanalysis

 No, twice no 551

new that might emerge from the old. It does not shout ‘No’, in repulsion,
rejection, flight or exclusion. It says the ‘no’. It does not do it, it does not
express it, it says it, at least when it succeeds in giving names to the
unnameable. And, in saying it, it allows for decision, which is always affir-
mation, always separation. To break off with one’s analyst is to keep him,
and it is not at all the same thing as to separate from him.
The aim of this paper, as the subtitle indicates, was to try to define and
dismantle the negative therapeutic reaction. By way of conclusion, I would
say that, if one wants to have a chance of dismantling the negative thera-
peutic reaction, at the level of theory as well as of practice, it is better to fail
to define it. For, in thinking that one has circumscribed it, either one pro-
tects oneself from it by wanting to lay down one’s own law, or one installs
it, leaving the terrain occupied by two similar desires but directed in oppo-
site directions in other words, two ‘no’s’ doing battle with each other.
Let us not forget however, that the ‘biggest battalions’ will never be on the
side of psychoanalysis.

References
Abraham K (1919). A particular form of neurotic resistance against the analytic method. In: Selected
Papers of Karl Abraham, Bryan D, Strachey A, translators, 303–11. London: Hogarth, 1973.
Gabrielle Dorey (1982). Entre le deuil et la trahison, la femme. Psychanalyse a  l’Universite

7, 26:199–
218.
Freud S (1905 [1904]). On psychotherapy. SE 7, 257–68.
Freud S (1915). A case of paranoia running counter to the psychoanalytic theory of the disease.
SE 14, 263–72.
Freud S (1916). Some character-types met with in psycho-analytic work. SE 14, 311–33.
Freud S (1922). Beyond the pleasure principle. Int Psychoanal Libr 4, 1–83.
Freud S (1923). The ego and the id. SE 19, 1–66.
Freud S (1925). Negation. SE 19, 235–39.
Freud S (1937). Analysis terminable and interminable. SE 23, 209–54.
Khan M (1963). The concept of cumulative trauma. In: The privacy of the self, 42–58. London:
Hogarth, 1974.
Laplanche J (1971). Vie et mort en psychanalyse. Paris: Flammarion.
Nacht S (1971). Gue
rir avec Freud. Paris: Payot.
Nunberg (1925). Du de sir de gue rison. Nouv Rev Psychanal 17:100–13.
Pontalis J-B (1974). Bornes ou confins. Nouv Rev Psychanal 10:5–16. [(1983). In: Entre le re ^ ve et la
douleur. Paris: Gallimard.]
Pontalis J-B (1977a). Le travail de la mort. In: Entre le re ^ ve et la douleur, 241–53. Paris: Gallimard,
1983.
Pontalis J-B (1977b). Sur la douleur psychique. In: Entre le re ^ ve et la douleur, 267. Paris: Gallimard,
1983.
Pontalis J-B (1983). Entre le re^ ve et la douleur. Paris: Gallimard.
re J (1936). A contribution to the analysis of the negative therapeutic reaction. Int J Psychoanal
Rivie
17:304–20.
Rosenfeld H (1975). Negative therapeutic reaction. In: Giovanni P, editor. Tactics and techniques in
psychoanalytic therapy, 103–35. New York, NY: Aronson, 1975.
Searles H (1975). The patient as therapist to his analyst. In: Countertransference and related subjects:
Selected papers, 380–459. New York, NY: International UP.
Starobinski J (1974). Reaction. Le mot et ses usages. Confrontations psychiatriques 12:19–42.
Stone L (1961). The psychoanalytic situation. New York, NY: International UP.
Zorn F (1976). Mars. Paris: Gallimard, 1979.

Copyright © 2014 Institute of Psychoanalysis Int J Psychoanal (2014) 95