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It is not, of course, only analysands who have resistances, the primarily unconscious forces that subtly sabotage us, not allowing us to confront the truth about ourselves, forces that keep us from truly and fully living in the present, that effectively and painfully interfere with our seeing what we
need, and who we are. A field of study can also demonstrate a resistance with similar destructive effects, imprisoning it in the past, arresting or retarding its mature development, its achievement of a more appropriate and complete self-definition.
Psychoanalysis has been significantly limited by its failure to overcome its resistance. In its long-standing traditions of training, publication, clinical practice, and theory derivation and refinement, our field has demonstrated a rigid opposition to developing and integrating empirical methods and empirical studies — a hermeneutic resistance.
As we know, resistances, unexamined and unresolved, have significant consequences. For psychoanalysis, our lack of an empirical research tradition has made and increasingly makes us vulnerable to criticism from within and without our field. These critics are many and diverse, ranging from Jacob Arlow (1982) who tells us that we are living in a new era of psychoanalytic history when we no longer have direct contact with the founding fathers. We, therefore, have to turn to other methods for our sources of confidence, methods that are less authority and more empirically based (p. 18); to Hans Eysenck (1963) who writes, with contempt overflowing, that studying personality on the analytic couch is like investigating Newton's and Einstein's rival hypotheses by going to sleep under an apple tree (p. 220).
An even more significant and negative consequence of psychoanaly-sis's contemporary and historical resistance to empirical investigation is our failure to develop an agreed-upon method for resolving theoretical controversies. This makes us profoundly vulnerable to the kind of rifts that fra