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The topic of resistance in groups and group resistance was memorialized some years ago in a cartoon in The New Yorker which shows two gentleman of rather shabby leisure conversing on a park bench. The caption reads, “For heaven's sake, I'm a group therapy dropout, too.” That cartoon sits on my desk as a reminder of the omnipresence of resistance and also of the omnipresent inadequacy of group therapists.
I looked at the cartoon recently and realized that one of the characters bore a resemblance to a person who left one of my groups, a gentleman who had come in under considerable pressure from his wife because he had such a bad relationship with their daughter. In the initial interview he told me he had had treatment before, ten sessions with an analyst. I introduced him to the group by saying, “This is John and you all better get to know him pretty quickly because he's not going to be around much longer.” John protested the unfairness of this comment. In his second session he told the group how he handled his daughter, and they gave him all kinds of good advice which he went home and carried out. Ten sessions later he bade a happy farewell to the group.
Resistance was first mentioned almost a hundred years ago by its discoverer, Sigmund Freud (1895). From the publication of Studies in Hysteria onward, the concept evolved and was clarified. In the beginning it was seen as an action taken by the ego to protect the process of repression, and the analyst's task was to overcome it. It was “nothing but the child's character” and stood in the way of analytic work (1897, p. 226). Soon this understanding was broadened and Freud wrote, “Whatever interrupts the progress of