Resistance of the Non-Communicating Patient in the Group*

The term “non-communicating patient” is useful for discussion purposes, but we recognize that it is not strictly accurate. When two or more persons assemble in the same place, some type of communication goes on between them provided that at least one of them has the capacity to recognize it. Even though they do not communicate voluntarily and intentionally in words, they convey information about themselves through whatever else they do as they maintain silence. A momentous message may be transmitted involuntarily and unintentionally through an action, such as the first kick by which the unborn child notifies the mother of its presence. As Emerson remarked, “Actions are a kind of words.”

Resistance too is a “kind of words.” Through resistance, a person undergoing psychotherapy communicates the information that he is unable to engage consistently in spontaneous, emotionally significant verbal communication. The notion of resistance as the absence of communication and the antithesis of self-revelation has been discarded in analytic psychotherapy. Resistance is now conceptualized as the primitive, inadequate, indirect form of self-revelation which is characteristic of a person who functions on a level of emotional immaturity. In a letter to Wilhelm Fliess in 1897, Freud referred to resistance as an “objectively tangible thing,” and “in the last resort the thing that stands in the way of the work” of the psychoanalyst. He also registered agreement