You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The term “resistance” refers to all those forces within the patient that oppose the treatment. Thus, resistance is ubiquitous, and profound questions arise from many sources as to the most effective technique to help patients overcome them. Without a doubt, the topic of resistance is enmeshed in all considerations of technique in the practice of psychoanalysis.
The format of this book is excellent, unusual, and helpful for the practitioner. There are three major categories: basic concepts, specific techniques, and particular diagnostic categories. The book begins with a precis and some distilled, relevant clinical applications for each chapter. The chapters that are important for understanding the historical perspective on resistance are those by Sigmund Freud, Anna Freud, Reich, Greenson, and Kohut. In the remainder of the book, authors predominantly address the frame of psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapy.
The term “resistance” was first used in the case of Fraulein Elizabeth von R., 1893, which Freud wrote about “in the language that catches the excitement of his discovery,” In the Interpretation of Dreams, Freud stated that “whatever interrupts the progress of the analytic work is a resistance” (p. 517). The historical thread is then elucidated through the “Dora Case” ; “Remembering, Repeating and Working Through” ; “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” ; and “Analysis Terminable and Interminable” .
Ralph Greenson has been a catalyst in focusing attention on resistance, and he has bequeathed us clear and instructively stated procedures for dealing with ego-alien resistances. The authors quote what I consider to be the fundamental statement from him on resistance, from his major work, The Technique and Practice of Psychoanalysis:
Psychoanalytic therapy is characterized by the thorough and systematic analysis of resistances. It is the task of the psychoanalyst to uncover how the patient resists, what he is resisting, and why he does so. The immediate cause
Page 140of a res