Negative transference is the psychoanalytic term for the transference of negative and hostile feelings, rather than positive ones, onto a therapist (or other emotional object).
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Later formulations
Melanie Klein in her disputes with Anna Freud laid much greater emphasis than her opponent on the constructive role to be played by interpreting the negative transference. Jacques Lacan followed her theoretical lead in seeing "the projection of what Melanie Klein calls bad internal objects" as key to "the negative transference that is the initial knot of the analytic drama" - though he himself would face criticism for glossing over the negative transference in training analyses, to keep his analysands in dependence.
W. R. D. Fairbairn was also more interested in the negative than the positive transference, which he saw as a key to the repetition and exposure of unconscious attachments to internalised bad objects. In his wake, object relations theorists have tended to stress the positive results that can emerge from working with the negative transference.
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Literary analogues
Describing the process of becoming the focus of a paranoid's hostility, C. P. Snow wrote:
"No one likes being hated: most of us are afraid of it: it jars to the bone when we meet hatred face to face."