Negative Transference

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The term negative transference refers to the aspects of the transference that counter the progress of psychoanalytic treatment. It is thus not a matter simply of the patient's expressing hostile feelings towards the analyst—which may in fact be helpful to the treatment—but rather negative feelings toward the person of the analyst that strengthen resistances and may bring analytic work to a halt whether or not the sessions are actually broken off. Freud evoked these difficulties as early as the Studies on Hysteria...