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It is axiomatic, and at first glance perhaps even trite, to point out that people resist change, individually and collectively. They struggle to maintain the status quo while often, simultaneously, disclaiming any such tendency. This ubiquitous paradox is most clearly observed in our daily clinical work with patients. The psychic phenomenon of resistance is of such paramount importance that if we devote all of our therapeutic efforts to its thorough resolution, we can conduct successful therapies and analyses. In our therapeutic work, resistance claims our first attention. Our foremost efforts are to overcome resistances in their myriad forms throughout the course of our work with patients. Less dynamic therapies utilize various approaches to overcome resistance — support, encouragement, persuasion, and other methods that usually bypass the deeper roots of resistance. Psychodynamically based psychotherapy, including psychoanalysis, attempts to resolve resistance through the continuing collaborative endeavor to understand the unconscious fears that give rise to resistances and that sustain the resistances. When these fears are thoroughly understood then various degrees of encouragement and support are usually required to persuade the patient to explore new modes of thinking, feeling, and acting, while we are ever alert to the inevitable periodic resurgence of old resistances.
In a very real sense, Jean Baker Miller has initiated a probing analysis of our individual and our collective resistances to change in our own deeper understanding of the psychology of women — or, more precisely, of the psychology of women and of men and of female-male relationships. She does this with the astuteness and awareness of a skilled and experienced clinician as she points up the defects in our present understanding, the precise psychodynamic bases for these deficiencies, and the specific emotional forces that cause us (women and men, different for each) to cling to these deficient and