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THE STUDY OF RESISTANCE HAS NOT, until recently, fared at all well in psychoanalytic research and discussion. Along with some other, at last equally difficult issues, it does not, somehow, seem to stand up to a careful exposition of its historical development as a major defining term of clinical psychoanalytic inquiry. As though to cover up some secret and unacceptable historical origins, its examination has previously earned the dubious status of deferment to some indefinite date in the future. But now, perhaps because current psychoanalytic research is already moving beyond the adaptive and consensual point of view, and as new metapsychology, is also manifesting a far greater concern with the psychology of the self, that future may, finally, be here.
Compare the limited study of resistance with, for example, the many and extensive studies of transference carried out since the matured statement of the classical id model of psychoanalysis of 1915–1917. Or, as further example, compare it with the many and extensive studies of anxiety carried out since the full envisioning of the modern ego-interpersonal (and object relational) models of the 1930s. For reasons that I shall outline in hypothetical form below, it has, to date, escaped the empirical and systematic treatment that, one might expect, so basic a definition of clinical psychoanalytic inquiry deserves.
The notion of resistance is, of course, first defined in the classical id model as a function of the positive and the negative transference of the instinctual-libidinal derivatives under direct clinical psychoanalytic