Resistance and Primitive Anxiety

Whether they are composed of brief evasions and lapses of attention, or refusals to cooperate and missed sessions, resistances entail a retreat from contact with an analyst, and a withdrawal from the anxiety inherent in psychoanalysis. Work with resistances has been closely tied to conceptions of the nature of anxiety and the role of the analyst in promoting psychological change. Although they were originally defined as manifestations of an antilibidinal force to be overcome in the patient, resistances are now viewed as communications about the patient's fears of both the analysis itself and psychological growth. Resistances maintain neurotic trends and inevitably persist because of unconscious defenses as well as deficits within the self and the ego. Primitive anxiety refers to those powerful anxieties that exceed simple conflict and threaten the self, such as the fear of death, of abandonment, and of disorganization. Primitive anxieties disclose remnants of traumatic affects and intense anxiety that may approach “not me” experience or the loss of the sense of the self. There are several dimensions of resistance I wish to emphasize before outlining the functions of resistance; peoples' primitive fears, chiefly death fears, need to be addressed as sources of resistance. Resistances are essentially both intrapsychic and interpersonal events that demonstrate unconscious fears of growth and change. Just as they initially signal anxiety about involvement in analysis, resistances quickly express unconscious fears of death, separation, and loss which become part of transference patterns. To the extent that the slow process of growth remains equated with the fear of death, then, there will be much ambivalence about the prospect of any psychological change. As unintegrated or disassociated aspects of the self and early life experiences are examined and relived with an analyst, death anxiety may be