10 Discussion: Kohut's Reformulations of Defense and Resistance as Applied in Therapeutic Psychoanalysis

Kohut's chapter “The Self Psychological Approach to Defense and Resistance” is of particular interest in that it bridges theory of development and function and theory of technique. In this chapter Kohut, as is his proclivity, gives us a clear clinical presentation so that we can fully understand what it is that he would like us to consider. He asks us to reevaluate one of the shibboleths of therapeutic psychoanalysis, “resistance.”

The concept, “resistance,” like its related concept “energy,” has an appeal to those of us who grew up in the 20th century with its lexicon of ohms, watts, volts, and the like. “Resistance,” “energy,” and similar metaphors are convincing and at the same time spurious. Kohut in this chapter helps us look beyond the language to see the essentials in the concept, resistance.

Kohut accurately notes that “resistance” is a concept inextricable from therapy; “defense” is a concept of development and functioning. In short resistances are constellations of defenses that are brought forth in characteristic ways as the analytic process develops. In this chapter, Kohut views resistance as responses to various kinds of threat to “self.” This is a valuable switch in emphasis from resistance seen as a mitigating response to threatening emergence of drive, although this new view may be but a subtype within a more generic concept of resistance as a response to mitigate full awareness of an idea and its implications in transferential context. To me, resistance is inseparable from transference. It is an interpersonal process involving analyst and patient, of course, not analyst as is, although that contributes, but analyst as construed to be. At times, it seems that, as in an example offered of the reanalysis of a colleague, Kohut demonstrates his great ability to analyze transference missed or incorrectly interpreted by a predecessor rather than illustrating a shift in understanding from the traditional to the “self-informed” point of view. It is more a call