Recounts and explores the disappointing and sometimes tragic evolutions of the treatments of certain patients who are resistant to the effects of analytic work. This book reports cases taken from the author's own experience and that of his collaborators.

Psychoanalytic Ideas and Applications Series , Preface , Introduction , Presentation , Theoretical Study , From the treatment of neuroses to the crisis of psychoanalysis , Lacanian thinking on language , The setting and its interpretation , Die Entstellung , The metaphorization of analytic speech , The negative therapeutic reaction , The notion of failure , Variety of traumas , Some effects of the primitive superego , The ego prior to repression , Libidinal styles , Drive fusion and defusion , The modifications of the ego and the work of the negative , Diverse critical situations and acute somatizations , Causes and remedies , Recent suggestions concerning the treatment of cases resistant to the therapeutic effect of analysis , Methodological principles of psychoanalysis and the psychotherapies , Conclusions , Clinical Study , (A) Some examples drawn from the experience of collaborators , (B) Personal memories of some case histories , Illusions and Disillusions of Psychoanalytic Work , The internalization of the negative , Hypotheses concerning the negative beyond clinical findings , An encounter at the end of the journey , Postscript