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From the beginning of his psychological inquiries, Freud stressed the importance of the dynamic factor for the resolution of the neurosis. If a patient recalls a trauma without reëxperiencing the related affects, these are not discharged and he fails to feel relieved from the neurotic libidinal tension. The related affects remain, as Freud said, 'pent up'. Also in the case of repressed drives it is not enough for the patient to gain only the intellectual conviction of having, unconsciously, this or that drive, in order to change the psychodynamics. The desired internal changes take place only by the actual experience of the emotions belonging to the repressed memories or drives. In this sense alone can it be said that the patient becomes conscious of what formerly was unconscious. He is confronted with internal forces which constantly try to prevent the reappearance in his consciousness of repressed memories, drives, and related affects. These opposing forces or resistances are organized in a countercathexis, typical for each neurosis.
One of the tasks of psychoanalytic treatment is precisely to help the patient overcome these psychic obstacles and so enable him to reëxperience the repressed affects and emotions as well as to become aware of their connections with other psychic phenomena. Thus the analysis of resistances, and the elaboration of technical procedure to surmount them, arose as one of the most important problems of such treatment.
A far more difficult task of psychoanalytic treatment is to induce or enable the patient to give up, successively, infantile reaction-patterns, habits, etc., of a certain kind. It is indeed much more difficult for an individual to accomplish in his later life what he did not succeed in accomplishing in his past