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Freud emphasized the profound significance of the resolution of resistance both for the patient and for the treatment. In his Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis he stated:
Analytic treatment makes as great demands for efforts on the part of the patient as on the physician, efforts to abolish the inner resistances. The patient's mental life is permanently changed by overcoming these resistances, is lifted to a higher level of development and remains proof against fresh possibilities of illness. The labor of overcoming the resistances is the essential achievement of the analytic treatment.
Through the vehicle of resistance the psychoanalytic patient conveys the message that he is incapable of engaging consistently in spontaneous, emotionally significant verbal communication. In its early view psychoanalysis saw resistance as the withholding of information. It is now understood as an inadequate, maladaptive and indirect form of self-revelation.
In the group setting resistance is recognized as the voluntary and involuntary (conscious and unconscious) methods by which group members avoid giving spontaneous and emotionally significant verbal expression to their life histories, feelings and thoughts.
In the group these are multi-directional and may operate in relation to the therapist, one or more fellow members or the whole group.