Concept
Resistance
Whatever obstructs access to unconscious material or the progress of the treatment.
Development
1895
introduced by Sigmund Freud
In his chapter on the psychotherapy of hysteria, Freud infers from the effort that pressing patients to recall cost him that his work had to overcome a psychical force in the patient that opposes the pathogenic ideas becoming conscious, and names it resistance.
In Studies on Hysteria (1895)
1912
developed by Sigmund Freud
Freud makes resistance a constant of the treatment, present in every association as a compromise with the forces aiming at recovery, and shows how transference is put in its service: the transference to the doctor serves resistance when it is negative, or positive but made of repressed erotic impulses.
In The Dynamics of Transference (1912)
1926
developed by Sigmund Freud
Within the structural model, Freud ties resistance to the ego's counter-cathexis and distinguishes five kinds from three sources: repression resistance, transference resistance and the gain from illness in the ego; the resistance of the id, which calls for working through; and the super-ego's resistance, from the need for punishment.
In Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety (1926)
1958
reworked by Jacques Lacan
Against an analysis of resistances aimed at the patient's ego, Lacan locates resistance on the analyst's side: it is produced by the analyst's own pressure and demand, while the subject's resistance to suggestion is read as the wish to keep desire alive.
In Écrits (1966)
Relations
- 1895 derives from Defense
Freud identifies the resistance met in treatment with the same force of the ego that first repelled the incompatible idea: resistance is defence as it shows itself in the work of recall.
- 1895 introduced by Sigmund Freud
In his chapter on the psychotherapy of hysteria, Freud infers from the effort that pressing patients to recall cost him that his work had to overcome a psychical force in the patient that opposes the pathogenic ideas becoming conscious, and names it resistance.
- 1912 developed by Sigmund Freud
Freud makes resistance a constant of the treatment, present in every association as a compromise with the forces aiming at recovery, and shows how transference is put in its service: the transference to the doctor serves resistance when it is negative, or positive but made of repressed erotic impulses.
- 1914 gave rise to Working through
Freud introduces working through as the patient's labour on a resistance already named by the analyst: naming it does not end it, and the patient must be given time to work through and overcome it.
- 1926 developed by Sigmund Freud
Within the structural model, Freud ties resistance to the ego's counter-cathexis and distinguishes five kinds from three sources: repression resistance, transference resistance and the gain from illness in the ego; the resistance of the id, which calls for working through; and the super-ego's resistance, from the need for punishment.
- 1958 reworked by Jacques Lacan
Against an analysis of resistances aimed at the patient's ego, Lacan locates resistance on the analyst's side: it is produced by the analyst's own pressure and demand, while the subject's resistance to suggestion is read as the wish to keep desire alive.
Works
- 1895
- 1926
Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety
Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety (Hemmung, Symptom und Angst), published in 1926 by the Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag, is Freud's major revision of his theory of anxiety and his first systematic account of defence within the structural model of ego, id and super-ego set out in The Ego and the Id (1923). The book opens by distinguishing inhibition, a restriction of an ego function undertaken as a precaution or through an impoverishment of energy, from the symptom, the sign and substitute of an instinctual satisfaction that has not taken place and the result of repression. Its central move reverses Freud's earlier view that repressed libido is transformed directly into anxiety. Re-examining the animal phobias of Little Hans and the Wolf Man, he concludes that in both the motive force of repression was castration anxiety, the ego's fear of an external danger: anxiety makes repression, not repression anxiety. The ego is the sole seat of anxiety. It produces anxiety as a signal when it anticipates danger, and through the pleasure principle the signal enables it to inhibit the threatening process in the id. Anxiety is traced to a situation of helplessness before mounting excitation, of which birth is the prototype. Freud separates the traumatic situation, in which anxiety arises automatically, as in the actual neuroses, from the danger situation, in which the ego reproduces a weakened form of it as a warning. The danger situations form a developmental series, each tied to a phase: psychical helplessness in the immature ego, loss of the object in early childhood, castration in the phallic phase, the super-ego's anger and loss of its love in latency, and finally the fear of death, read as the super-ego projected onto the powers of fate. Neurosis arises where people go on reacting to danger situations long outgrown; symptoms are formed to remove the ego from the danger situation that anxiety signals. Neurotic anxiety is anxiety about an instinctual danger the ego does not know, as realistic anxiety is about a known one. The book compares symptom formation in phobia, conversion hysteria and obsessional neurosis. In obsessional neurosis, regression to the anal-sadistic stage, a severe super-ego and reaction formations shape the symptoms, and Freud describes undoing and isolation as defensive techniques beside repression. He reinstates 'defence' as the general term for all the ego's protective techniques, repression being one of them. He discusses Otto Rank's The Trauma of Birth (1924), crediting it with linking every danger situation to separation from the mother but rejecting the claim that the severity of the birth trauma decides who becomes neurotic; he names instead the long helplessness of the human infant, the interruption of sexual development between early childhood and puberty, and the ego's imperfect means of guarding against internal danger. The addenda distinguish five kinds of resistance and separate anxiety, the reaction to the danger that object loss brings, from pain, the reaction to the loss itself, and from mourning.
- 1966
Lacan's collected papers, published by Éditions du Seuil in 1966: a volume of some nine hundred pages gathering articles and essays written over three decades, from 1936 to 1966. It includes the text on the mirror stage given at Zurich in 1949; the Rome discourse of 1953, 'The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis', which has been called the founding manifesto of Lacanianism; 'The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious' (1957); and the 1958 essay on the treatment of psychosis. Across these papers Lacan pursues his return to Freud by way of structural linguistics, reading the unconscious as structured like a language, and turns against the ego psychology of Hartmann, Kris and Loewenstein. The book became a bestseller in France and made Lacan known as 'the French Freud', while also fixing his reputation for difficulty. Its first complete English translation, by Bruce Fink with Héloïse Fink and Russell Grigg, was published by W. W. Norton in 2006.
See also
Linked from
People
References
- Studies on Hysteria1895Evidence for a relation
- The Dynamics of Transference1912Evidence for a relation
- Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety1926Evidence for a relation
- Écrits1966Evidence for a relation
- Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through1914Evidence for a relation