How to be a Resistance Fighter

By Kevin Murphy, M.Sc.,
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist
Dublin, Ireland.

I was talking to a woman some time ago who told me that she had been to a psychiatrist. She had been suffering from depression and had gone to see if she could get some help. She described the experience as useful but then, for a reason she didn’t quite understand, she decided to break off the treatment and didn’t go back. When I asked her why she did this she said she ‘had just felt stupid lying there not knowing what to say’.
That was that, she moved on and, as it turned out, someone else joined our conversation so I didn’t get the chance to discuss it further. But something about what she said has stayed with me since.
Psychoanalytic psychotherapy tends to focus on what people say, the words they use, in order to probe for a deeper understanding of what is going on ‘behind the scenes’. The reason this woman gave for breaking off her treatment was, on the one hand, short and seemingly straightforward. But looking a little further it has an underlying richness that illuminates a central element in the therapeutic process.
She said she had felt stupid lying there not knowing what to say. What she was actually describing, without realising it, was a moment that has a fundamental role in analysis. It was the moment of resistance. Sigmund Freud made this a central element of his classical psychoanalytic theory. It is the moment when forces within us fight against our competing desire to get something out. It is the irresistible force meeting an immoveable object that physics likes to speak about. The result is inertia, a dumbing silence in which nothing is said and nothing can be said. The experience from the client’s perspective is one of not having anything to say.
We repress thoughts and ideas that give rise to unpleasure. It happens in all of us and it happens often without us having to consciously think about it. It’s not all bad either, sometimes repression is necessary in order to allow us survive certain experiences and situations. But once something is repressed it has a tendency to return either as a direct memory or in other more diverse routes. And since it was usually unpleasurable to begin with, our automatic reaction is to keep it repressed. This activity of keeping something repressed is called resistance.
So how do we know this ‘resistance’ when it occurs? Well, as I said, it is when a client reaches a point in their story where there are no more words, when they fall into silence, when they become acutely aware of the therapist's presence and when they see a picture in their mind and tell themselves ‘no I will not talk about that’. A great many people come to therapy and censor out what they will and will not talk about. At least at first they do, until they get comfortable with the process, trust their therapist and realise they are wasting their money if they are not going to be honest with themselves.
I don’t mean to be puritanical about this. Every one of us experiences resistance in the consulting room at various times when we are the client. Sometimes we win over it, and sometimes it wins over us. But that is part of the challenge of therapy, returning again and again to see if we can overcome this inherent desire to keep things buried, if we can get to new things, throw new light into our dark corners.
Resistance also surfaces in the way some people tell themselves why things should remain hidden and out of sight: it will upset us, it will bring back bad memories, there is no need to go into all that old stuff again in order to move forward. All of these are very reasonable reasons. Modern psychoanalytic practice, particularly Lacanian theory, believes that each session should follow the path that the client decides to speak about with only minimal interruption or direction from the therapist. It does not dictate that a client’s history should always be forensically sifted in every session. It does not demand that the scene of trauma or unpleasant experience be revisited relentlessly. The pace is set by the client and each session grows out of those things the client wishes to speak about. The rationale is that if something repressed is trying to find expression it will eventually makes itself known either directly or indirectly.
Resistance also makes itself heard in the inner voice that tells us not to enter into or continue with therapy, as my example above showed. Resistance emanates from within and is designed to stop us doing the work of therapy, of asking questions of ourselves, of sorting through the experiences of our lives, of undertaking any kind of work that will question the very things which resistance is trying keep hidden. In short, it has succeeded when it brings therapy to a halt before it has reached its goal.
The woman mentioned above said she felt stupid lying there with nothing to say. Not only had resistance brought her to a stop in what she wanted to say, it then heaped a sense of embarrassment and humiliation on top for good measure. It didn’t really matter what ploys she unwittingly used against herself, the end result was exactly what the unconscious part of her wanted. She walked away from therapy with her questions unanswered and her dark corners comfortably unperturbed.