… An idea about resistance has enabled me to put straight all those cases of mine which had run into fairly severe difficulties, and to start them off again satisfactorily. Resistance, which finally brings work to a halt, is nothing other than the child's past character, his degenerate character, which (as a result of those experiences which one finds present consciously in what are called degenerate cases) has developed or might have developed, but which is overlaid here by the emergence of repression. I dig it out by my work, it struggles; and what was to begin with such an excellent, honest fellow, becomes low, untruthful or defiant, and a malingerer-till I tell him so and thus make it possible to overcome this character. In this way resistance has become something actual an tangible to me, and