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Four decades of experience with analytic group psychotherapy have provided a body of evidence that there are forces inherent in the group setting which can be used to produce significant therapeutic results. Exploitation of a group's therapeutic potential depends on the group analyst's ability to deal with the resistances to change.
Resistance was first identified by Freud (1895) as a force which opposed the entry into consciousness, the remembering, of pathogenic ideas. Thus resistance was originally connected exclusively with repression. However, in 1897 in a letter to Fliess, Freud (1954) happily announced his discovery that “Resistance is nothing but the character of the child.” This offered the first clue that resistance was an immature way of functioning and provided the basis for the subsequent recognition that resistance phenomena are identified with the defenses called upon by the ego to maintain emotional equilibrium and to ensure psychological survival. In this light, resistance can be understood as showing the patterns of adjustment which the patient developed on the various developmental levels of his life. Since these patterns arose in response to the stress of the very first group of which the patient was ever a member, they are of interest to the group therapist in helping him understand the genesis of those resistance which manifest themselves in the group setting.
Freud (1926) went on to amplify his understanding of resistance and identified five basic types: