A 'Technical' Form of Resistance

Psycho-analytical writers have long since familiarized us with the fact that newly acquired impressions can be made use of for purposes of unconscious presentation. The process of symbol-formation affords us perhaps the most striking illustration of this phenomenon. The Zeppelin and aeroplane, for example, have in recent years come to be included in the long list of accepted phallic symbols, and in the course of everyday analysis one can scarcely fail to meet with individual adaptations of current ideas in the expression of unconscious thinking. Due appreciation of this fact can lighten the task of interpretation considerably, but it is easy to see that the situation can be exploited as a means of resistance. Patients who cover their most powerful emotional resistances by a seemingly ready acceptance of psycho-analytical theory are especially prone to turn such displacements to advantage. It need hardly be said that their acceptance is of a purely intellectualistic sort.

Resistance of this type can, at one time or another, be observed in almost every case, but there are two groups in which it becomes a serious obstacle to progress. The first consists of obsessional types who have a flair for symbol-reading and a genius for interpretative theorizing, provided, of course, that no attempt is made to bring their own interpretations 'home to roost' in the emotional sense. The second group includes patients who are undertaking analysis for professional purposes. Here again, although no major symptoms may be present, it is usual to find some evidence of an obsessional disposition amongst those who fortify themselves against analytic progress by the 'appeal to theory'. In both groups the situations used as resistances are very much the same. The patient strives to control his own analysis, to cavil at interpretations or to substitute interpretations of his own, to check each day's work by a theoretical foot-rule and in every possible way to express his negative tra