The Collected Works of Sigmund Freud. Sigmund Freud
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intellectual resistances are not the worst, one can always get ahead of them. But the patient can also put up resistances, within the limits of the analysis, whose conquest belongs to the most difficult tasks of our technique. Instead of recalling, he actually goes again through the attitudes and emotions of his previous life which, by means of the so-called “transference,” can be utilized as resistances to the physician and the treatment. If the patient is a man, he takes this material as a rule from his relations to his father, in whose place he now puts the physician, and in so doing constructs a resistance out of his struggle for independence of person and opinion; out of his ambition to equal or to excel his father; out of his unwillingness to assume the burden of gratitude a second time in his life. For long times at a stretch one receives the impression that the patient desires to put the physician in the wrong and to let him feel his helplessness by triumphing over him, and that this desire has completely replaced his better intention of making an end to his sickness. Women are adepts at exploiting, for the purposes of the resistance, a tender, erotically tinged transference to the physician. When this leaning attains a certain intensity, all interest for the actual situation of the treatment is lost, together with every sense of the responsibility which was assumed by undertaking it. The never-failing jealousy as well as the embitterment over the inevitable repudiation, however gently effected, all must serve to spoil the personal understanding between patient and physician and thus to throw out one of the most powerful propelling forces of the analysis.
Resistances of this sort must not be narrow-mindedly condemned. They contain so much of the most important material of the patient’s past and reproduce it in such a convincing manner, that they become of the greatest aid to the analysis, if a skillful technique is able to turn them in the right direction. It is only remarkable that this material is at first always in the service of the resistance, for which it serves as a barrier against the treatment. One can also say that here are traits of character, adjustments of the ego which were mobilized in order to defeat the attempted change. We are thus able to learn how these traits arose under the conditions of the neurosis, as a reaction to its demands, and to see features more clearly in this character which could otherwise not have shown up so clearly or at least not to this extent, and which one may therefore designate as latent. You must also not get the impression that we see an unforeseen endangering of the analytic influence in the appearance of these resistances. On the contrary, we know that these resistances must come to light; we are dissatisfied only when we do not provoke them in their full strength and so make them plain to the patient Indeed, we at last understand that overcoming these resistances is the essential achievement of analysis and is that portion of the work which alone assures us that we have accomplished something with the patient.
You must also take into account the fact that any accidental occurrences which arise during the treatment will be made use of by the patient as a disturbance — every diverting incident, every statement about analysis from an inimical authority in his circle, any chance illness or any organic affection which complicates the neurosis; indeed, he even uses every improvement of his condition as a motive for abating his efforts. You will then have gained an approximate, though still an incomplete picture of the forms and devices of the resistance which must be met and overcome in the course of every analysis. I have given this point such detailed consideration because I am about to inform you that our dynamic conception of the neurosis is based on this experience with the resistance of neurotic patients against the banishment of their symptoms. Breuer and I both originally practiced psycho-therapy by means of hypnosis. Breuer’s first patient was treated throughout under a condition of hypnotic suggestibility, and I at first followed his example. I admit that my work at that time progressed easily and agreeably and also took much less time. But the results were capricious and not permanent; therefore I finally gave up hypnotism. Then only did I realize that no insight into the forces which produce these diseases was possible as long as one used hypnotism. The condition of hypnosis could prevent the physician from realizing the existence of a resistance. Hypnosis drives back the resistance and frees a certain field for the work of analysis, but similarly to the doubt in the compulsion neurosis, in so doing it clogs the boundaries of this field till they become impenetrable. That is why I can say that true psychoanalysis began when the help of hypnotism was renounced.
But if the establishment of the resistance thus becomes a matter of such importance, then surely we must give our caution full rein, and follow up any doubts as to whether we are not all too ready in our assumption of their existence. Perhaps there really are neurotic cases in which associations appear for other reasons, perhaps the arguments against our hypothesis really deserve more consideration and we are unjustified in conveniently rejecting all intellectual criticisms of analysis as a resistance. Indeed, ladies and gentlemen, but our judgment was by no means readily arrived at. We had opportunity to observe every critical patient from the first sign of the resistance till after its disappearance. In the course of the treatment, the resistance is moreover constantly changing in intensity. It is always on the increase as we approach a new theme, is strongest at the height of its elaboration, and dies down again when this theme has been abandoned. Furthermore, unless we have made some unusual and awkward technical error, we never have to deal with the full measure of resistance of which the patient is capable. We could therefore convince ourselves that the same man took up and discarded his critical attitude innumerable times in the course of the analysis. Whenever we are on the point of bringing before his consciousness some piece of unconscious material which is especially painful to him, then he is critical in the extreme. Even though he had previously understood and accepted a great deal, nevertheless all record of these gains seems now to have been wiped out. He may, in his desire to resist at any cost, present a picture of veritable emotional feeblemindedness. If one succeeds in helping him to overcome this new resistance, then he regains his insight and his understanding. Thus his criticism is not an independent function to be respected as such; it plays the role of handy-man to his emotional attitude and is guided by his resistance. If something displeases him, he can defend himself against it very ingeniously and appear most critical. But if something strikes his fancy, then he may show himself easily convinced. Perhaps none of us are very different, and the patient under analysis shows this dependence of the intellect on the emotional life so plainly only because, under the analysis, he is so hard pressed.
In what way shall we now account for the observation that the patient so energetically resists our attempts to rid him of his symptoms and to make his psychic processes function in a normal way? We tell ourselves that we have here come up against strong forces which oppose any change in the condition; furthermore, that these forces must be identical with those which originally brought about the condition. Some process must have been functional in the building up of these symptoms, a process which we can now reconstruct by means of our experiences in solving the meaning of the symptoms. We already know from Breuer’s observations that the existence of a symptom presupposes that some psychic process was not carried to its normal conclusion, so that it could not become conscious. The symptom is the substitute for that which did not take place. Now we know where the forces whose existence we suspect must operate. Some violent antagonism must have been aroused to prevent the psychic process in question from reaching consciousness, and it therefore remained unconscious. As an unconscious thought it had the power to create a symptom. The same struggle during the analytic treatment opposes anew the efforts to carry this unconscious thought over into consciousness. This process we felt as a resistance. That pathogenic process which is made evident to us through the resistance, we will name repression.
We are now ready to obtain a more definite idea of this process of repression. It is the preliminary condition for the formation of symptoms; it is also a thing for which we have no parallel. If we take as prototype an impulse, a psychological process which is striving to convert itself into action, we know that it may succumb before a rejection, which we call “repudiation” or “condemnation.” In the course of this struggle, the energy which the impulse had at its disposal was withdrawn from it, it becomes powerless; yet it may subsist in the form of a memory. The whole process of decision occurs with the full knowledge of the ego. The state of affairs is very different if we imagine that this same impulse has been subjected to repression. In that case, it would retain its energy and there would be no memory of it left; in addition, the process of repression would be carried out without the knowledge of the ego. Through this comparison, however, we have come no nearer understanding the nature of repression.