The removal of resistances can mean the final loss of the individuality of the person concerned . . . It is really only the psychoanalysts who respect resistances and see in them the unconscious struggle of the person to find himself.

D.W. Winnicott, ‘Leucotomy’

Never before​ has the word ‘resistance’ felt at once more imperative and more difficult to imagine and discuss. I want to ask whether the small world of psychoanalysis has anything even implicitly to offer – or even to say – on this subject, mindful of how grandiose and strangely irrelevant psychoanalysis can sometimes seem when applied, beyond the consulting room, to political life. To resist something or someone is to try to ensure that some outcome won’t happen; and the resistance implies that – consciously or unconsciously – you know both what you are resisting and what will happen if you don’t resist. And perhaps, above all, as the above quotation from Winnicott suggests, you are protecting your sense of yourself (sometimes the point and sometimes the problem; the patient in psychoanalysis uses his resistances to over-protect himself, and in that sense, resistance can be a protection racket). Resistance, that is to say, is often a state of conviction, if not actually a state of omniscience; at its most minimal it is a knowledge-claim, about oneself and about whatever is taken to be threatening oneself. Resistance is at once recognition and a fantasy of catastrophe; indeed, in resisting one has always leaped forward to the impending catastrophe – the catastrophe of submitting to or complying with something fundamentally unacceptable. Or, as we shall see, one is in the process of finding something out: resistance as a form of curiosity.

Resistance, at least in a psychoanalytic context, is felt as a form of malign prediction or prophecy; it is often quick and concise knowledge of the future in the service of self-protection, even though one doesn’t always know what the danger is, nor what it is about oneself that might be harmed. And, perhaps above all, one must first have been drawn to something or someone – noticed them, picked them out, felt something in their presence – as the precondition for resisting them. So, resistance reveals preference and affinity, and fear and suspicion, political sympathy and personal antipathy, and the way these might come or go together. This is resistance as conflicted engagement. Resistance, as Derrida argues in Resistances of Psychoanalysis, is a romance and a project. ‘This word,’ he writes,

which resonated in my desire and my imagination as the most beautiful word in the politics and history of this country, this word loaded with all the pathos of my nostalgia, as if, at any cost, I would like not to have missed blowing up trains, tanks and headquarters between 1940 and 1945 – why and how did it come to attract, like a magnet, so many other meanings, virtues, semantic or disseminal chances?

Resistance, as Derrida makes clear, is the nexus for multiple significant, contemporary meanings, from the French resistance to the Nazis to Freud’s virtual obsession with the modern individual’s determined resistance to his own desire – to his own nature – and his consequent resistance to psychoanalysis as both a treatment and an account of so-called human nature. Resistance to tyranny, both internal and external, has become a pressing (and sometimes tyrannical) modern preoccupation; the alternatives to resistance – the resistance to resistance – follow in the wake of this. Resistance has gradually come to be seen as the key to survival in an oppressive modern world: a necessary talent, a talent that psychoanalysis, in part, gives us a language with which to think, and talk, about.

The question – which is sometimes a psychoanalytic question – is what would be a good reason to go beyond our resistance? How can one distinguish stage fright from all the other frights? That, one might say, is what it is to take a risk: to find out what is stage fright; which resistances are there to be overcome; which resistances comprise one’s individuality; which are the guardians of what matters most. And, of course, which of one’s resistances are temptations in disguised form. Psychoanalysis, at its best, reveals one’s repressed repertoire of untaken and alluring risks; and so reveals what one is tempted to resist, and why, in desperation, one might need to turn a resistance into a phobia, which never feels remotely like a resistance, but feels, to the sufferer, un-negotiable, beyond consideration. So, when we are thinking about resistance – and partly, but not only in a psychoanalytic setting – it is always worth asking: what is it that I am unable or unwilling to engage with? What do I think I need to avoid to remain myself as I prefer to be? Which also means, what am I unwilling or unable to talk about? Psychoanalysis begins when conversation breaks down, where the conversation becomes impossible, where there is a reluctance to go on speaking, a pause, a hesitation, a wilful changing of the subject. We are full of sentences, and phrases, and words that we dare not speak, even to ourselves. And as with all strong censorship, it never occurs to us that we are being censored. Successful censorship is never experienced as censorship; it seems part of us. In the psychoanalytic story, all resistance is originally or eventually resistance to speaking, resistance to language. And this is of course our testament to the power of language, and to the power of resistance. From a psychoanalytic point of view, language and resistance are inextricable. This apparently simple fact, the fact that language, among other things, is what we resist, has some startling consequences. As the poet Isaac Rosenberg wrote, ‘who knows what we miss through not having spoken?’

There is a clinical vignette described by the Canadian psychoanalyst Emmanuel Ghent that exposes some of the psychoanalytic clichés about resistance. ‘Many years ago,’ Ghent writes (and even the details he begins with would be resisted by so-called orthodox analysts),

I had an office on the ground floor of a Greenwich Village brownstone. As it faced out on a large garden and much open space, the office was quite susceptible to chilly drafts on windy winter days. One such day a woman patient was haltingly recounting, as was her wont, the details of some event that had recently occurred … She was sitting in a chair at right angles to me, about fifteen feet from the windows. Suddenly, but not abruptly, I got up, went over to where a Scottish throw was folded on the couch, picked it up, covered her lap and legs with it, and returned to my chair. As I sat down, I noticed, to my surprise, that she was sobbing silently. It was the first time in our work, by then over two years in duration, that there was any indication of distress, pain or even sadness. After some time, her first words were, ‘I didn’t even know I was feeling cold,’ and then she wept profusely. The event was a turning point.

Ghent’s commentary on this remarkable and simple moment is to describe what he calls ‘this conservative tendency’ as ‘a species of need’:

The form it takes may be some version of a repetition compulsion, a need to grind out some rendering of an old and usually self-defeating pattern … But mixed in with the apparent need to repeat, another (and opposing) motivational system, or need, is operating as well, one that is usually much weaker and less developed; it is an expansive rather than a conservative system, one whose tendency or need is either to seek out a new quality of experience, or to destabilise the smooth functioning of the old, constrictive system.

It is as though this woman’s not mentioning, or perhaps not even noticing, that she was cold was an unconscious love test. Would Ghent’s engagement with her be such that he would notice she was cold and act on this noticing? The woman was assuming, taking for granted, a kind of neglect, an inability or an unwillingness on the part of herself and of the person she was with to acknowledge and enter into what she might need (presumably an unwitting repetition of a childhood situation). You might say – at a profoundly unconscious level – she was resisting her experience of being cold and resisting making a demand for warmth. But she would not have known she was resisting anything unless and until Ghent acted on his recognition (it is a minor but not insignificant detail that orthodox Freudian analysts would not put blankets on their patients; they would resist, for want of a better word, ordinary straightforward acts of kindness in the service of supposedly higher psychoanalytic aims). This woman could only acknowledge and begin to overcome her resistance when somebody else recognised her behaviour as resistance. Until this happened, she wasn’t, from her point of view resisting anything. She was just being herself.

One might infer from this example that ordinary everyday behaviour may be an unconscious probe to find out what the other person will do with what I do or don’t do, with what I say or don’t say; and whether they can imagine and articulate the need in it, whether they can see something in it that I can’t. It is as though ordinary life is a performance art in front of, initially, one’s parents and then anyone else who might be interested in one’s wants and needs, in one’s preoccupations. So the resistance is initially in the audience; once Ghent notices what his patient needs and acts on it, she can too. This is a version, in quite different language, of Lacan’s remark that the resistance is always in the analyst.

We don’t always know what we are resisting, or even that we are resisting; and we are dependent on the recognition of others who by their words and their actions show us our resistances. They must be able to resist our resistances by seeing them for what they are. The people whose company we keep must not resist their sympathetic and imaginative interest in us. Ghent and his fellow relational analysts – the tradition of psychoanalysis derived from Freud’s radical and innovative colleague Sándor Ferenczi – offer us a new picture of sociability, of what people might want and need to do together to improve the quality of their lives, or to make something new and different of themselves. Something, in Ghent’s word, less constricted. As if to say – and it is not a mystery why this would be so, but it is shocking – that we resist articulating our needs to ourselves and to others; and we resist the experiment in living that expressing one’s needs often entails. And perhaps paramount in this story, and indeed in the Freudian story with which it is aligned, is that paradoxically we are most likely to resist what is most important to us. That is how we know it is important to us: we resist acknowledging it and acknowledging its importance. We resist – at its most extreme in the part of ourselves that Freud enigmatically called the death instinct – the wish to survive and flourish and be gratified. That resistance, in the vocabulary of psychoanalysis, can be the resistance to being alive, the resistance to our aliveness, which is also a resistance to our dependence on one another. The by now familiar diagnostic psychoanalytic categories – hysteria, obsessionality, depression, anxiety, anorexia, phobias – are all forms of self-obsession that are fundamentally self-depriving, self-starving ways of living (which is why, by the same token, psychoanalysis should free us of our interest in ourselves). They are not in the service of what Nietzsche called ‘more life’.

But we should perhaps bear in mind that it may be both true and useful to say that one only resists something one is capable of not resisting. That resistance always signifies – whatever else it portends or points to – possibility; resistance, as resistance and not incapacity, is always a missed opportunity. Resistance is something we make, and make up; an artefact of everyday life. And so, by the same token, it is worth looking at the limit cases; at the cases in which the question is: can this refusal or sense of impossibility be described as resistance, and if not why not? If you describe something as a resistance, what are you describing it as? How can you tell an incapacity from a refusal? And one answer may be, you have to experiment, you have to want to find out, which is why psychoanalysis is as much about inciting the patient’s curiosity as it is about alleviating their suffering.

Discussing Aquinas’s conviction that language cannot by definition describe or define God, the philosopher Stephen Mulhall writes: ‘As I began to read each individual Grammatical Thomist’s body of work more systematically [theologians inspired by Aquinas’s beliefs about language, that Mulhall links to some of Wittgenstein’s ideas about nonsense],

it became clear that one central point of resemblance between them lay in their willingness to characterise discourse about God as nonsensical – more specifically their willingness to take as a touchstone of theological insight the awareness that language was essentially incapable of putting us in touch with the reality of God, given the fact that (as mainstream Christianity has always averred) he is utterly transcendent with respect to the world we users of language inhabit, and in relation to which our words attain and maintain whatever meaning or sense they possess.

Mulhall quotes the philosopher D.Z. Phillips by way of clarification: ‘When [believers] speak of that which passes understanding, they invite us to consider the possibility of reacting to human life in a way other than by the understanding.’ In other words, when it comes to conceiving of God, understanding, or the language of understanding, may be beside the point. It may be what is called in philosophy a ‘category error’. It is not clear whether God, by definition, or by intention as it were, resists understanding – the kind of understanding that human language makes available – or whether the whole notion of resistance becomes irrelevant, partly because when it comes to God understanding is irrelevant. Are we, or our language, resistant or simply incapable of conceiving of God; if we are merely resisting, we might, as it were, try harder (the notion of resistance always brings with it a sense of possibilities and options). But what is being insisted on here is that language and description and understanding are of no possible use in our relationship with God. And what this irrelevance of resistance – in us, in our language or in God – makes clear, among many other things, is that talking about resistance reveals a confidence in human agency, in human potentiality; that one of the things that we are more than able to do is to resist, and the implication might be that if we know how to resist we know how to stop resisting. Resistance is a human artefact, a device, a trick for surviving, but not useful or usable everywhere in our lives. And just as we need to know when and where resistance is the right word for what we are doing, we need to know when it is the wrong word, the wrong picture, the wrong description (calling something a resistance might, say, make us overconfident about solutions). We are not resisting giving an account of God and our relationship with him, it is simply something we can’t do; and among other things this inspires us to acknowledge where else, in D.Z. Phillips’s words, we can ‘react to human life in a way other than by the understanding’.

We resist understanding for all sorts of reasons, and sometimes understanding is not the point. Were I to call all lack of understanding resistance, I might drive myself mad. Once we have dropped the idea of our resisting something we might say, ‘I’m not resisting, I’m just doing something in my own way’; once resistance is out of the picture, we might try to work out what else might be going on if resistance is not on the cards.

The resistance story about ourselves is really a fear story about ourselves; it suggests that self-protection is our paramount consideration, and that vulnerability is our primary preoccupation. And God, as our representative figure for omnipotence and omniscience, is that which cannot be resisted, with all the pleasure and relief and terror this entails (we might think here of Abraham, or Jonah; or in a secular context we may think of so-called addictions). Our investment in the idea of omniscience and omnipotence – alive and well as the most wishful and wished-for part of ourselves – attests to our founding ambivalence about resistance. Resistance and its relinquishment are both compelling objects of desire. Development is the ongoing discovery of where in one’s life resistance works, and what, when it does work, it works in the service of. We may wonder whether we prefer to define ourselves by what we cannot resist – breathing, eating, dependence, ageing, death – or by what we can resist. If we describe someone or something as irresistible, we are either, in a bad-faith kind of way pretending to relinquish our agency (as though to be without intention is to be without guilt), or we have come up against the limits of our agency. God exposes the limits of our language. And as Freud and the psychoanalysts who followed him wondered, is language the form our resistance takes, or are there limits to language that have nothing to do with our resistance?

‘A poet’s words and rhythms are not his utterance so much as his resistance,’ Geoffrey Hill wrote in his book about the ‘circumstances of language’, The Enemy’s Country. Resistance is always a way of talking about agency and language and invention; it is a way of trying to sort out our determinisms from our freedoms, of determining where what we call our control begins and ends. What, Hill makes us ask, are the poet’s words and rhythms a resistance to, and why is resistance what we believe we need to do? What do we think will happen to us if we don’t resist (noting, meanwhile, that many, though not all, of our greatest pleasures and achievements in life involve a kind of yielding, the overcoming of a resistance)? I think it is of interest that once we become bewitched by the idea of resistance – as psychoanalysis encourages us to be – we begin to see it everywhere, as though we forget to ask what the notion of resistance can itself be a form of resistance to (or, indeed, what it might be useful for). It becomes all too easily essential to the picture we have of ourselves. Art as resistance; sexuality and aggression as that which we resist; resistance in political life; mobilising the body’s resistances in immunity and so on. The term ‘resistance’ is used four times in Shakespeare’s plays and 629 times in the Standard Edition translation of Freud. It seems suggestive, but it might be unwise, to speculate as to what kind of cultural shift that may or may not reveal. The differences between resisting, opposing and withstanding seem telling. But each word intimates, at its most minimal, degrees of impermeability; the setting of limits to exchange; the fear of impingement and violation, and indeed flexibility; the absence or presence of a certain kind of agency or autonomy. In our resistances are we making something of ourselves or submitting to something? And all of this implies questions about degrees or versions of agency and choice-making. When we talk about resistance we can’t help but talk around and about intentionality. All psychoanalytic stories about development are about the opening and closing of the bodily self; and the way the possibility of resistance – of resistances of various kinds – makes development possible (Winnicott and Lacan in quite different languages spoke up for the individual’s capacity not to be unduly waylaid by the demands of other people). It was impossible for Freud to describe the modern individual without the word and the idea of resistance.

If one word​ for resistance in psychoanalysis is defence, the other word for resistance in psychoanalysis is pleasure. And just as, of course, there are many so-called ‘mechanisms of defence’ in psychoanalytic theory, there are many kinds of pleasure; not least, of course, the pleasure of having no pleasure, the pleasure involved in attacking one’s pleasures. The pleasure, in short, of resisting or even triumphing over one’s pleasures: pleasure as a resistance to pain, masochism as the psychic trick of making pain pleasurable. Freud found resistances everywhere; and increasingly it was the paradoxical and ironic and indeed intractable senses of resistance that he was more and more preoccupied by. Resistance, he quickly realised, was never straightforward. Writing about the ‘resistances against analytic treatments and impediments to therapeutic success’ in his late, great paper, ‘Analysis Terminable and Interminable’, Freud found he was writing about

the ultimate things which psychological research can learn about: the behaviour of the two primal instincts [the life instinct and the death instinct], their distribution, mingling and defusion – things which we cannot think of as being confined to a single province of the mental apparatus, the id, the ego or the superego. No stronger impression arises from the resistances during the work of psychoanalysis than of there being a force which is defending itself by any possible means against recovery and which is absolutely resolved to hold on to illness and suffering … For the moment we must bow to the superiority of the forces against which we see our efforts come to nothing.

The patient who comes to psychoanalytic treatment ostensibly to be cured wants nothing less than to be cured. What is wanted is resisted; what is wanted is resistance. Freud had discovered through his psychoanalytic work that the patient who resisted his sexual and aggressive impulses because they were forbidden – sabotaging his hard-won equilibrium and exposing the intensity of his neediness and so of his dependence – by the same token resisted psychoanalytic treatment because it exposed him to the parts of himself he needed to repress, deny or conceal, most of all from himself. (‘The defensive mechanisms directed against former danger,’ Freud writes, ‘recur in the treatment as resistances against recovery. It follows from this that the ego treats recovery as a new danger.’) There is a profound resistance to the desires of instinctual life, and so a tenacious resistance to any form of treatment that urges the acknowledgment of such desires. And, to add insult and despair to injury, in his supposed discovery of a so-called death instinct – always a contentious idea in psychoanalysis – Freud realised that there was also an elemental and powerful part of the self that didn’t in any sense want to feel better: it wanted either to suffer or to feel nothing and was determined to abolish all forms of excitement and aliveness and enjoyment in the self. What it seemed to resist was life itself. Resistance is not quite the right word for Freud’s supposed death instinct, which is more of an attacking force, but Freud was simply discovering the limits of psychoanalytic treatment; it would take Ferenczi to reveal just how narrow, limited and limiting, and indeed pessimistic, Freud’s account of resistance really was, almost as though there was a part of Freud that resisted psychoanalysis (and called that resistance the death instinct).

In the Freudian subject, of course, there is no strong agency, or sense of agency, just a beleaguered and often forlorn and helpless ego struggling with the overwhelming pressure of the internal world, the external world and what Lacan refers to as the ‘obscene superego’, obscene in the ruthless severity of its restrictiveness and its punitiveness. Freud says that the ego is not master in its own house; in his account, virtually nothing can resist the power of these resistances to being helped. In fact, we can only speak of resistances to being helped if it is assumed that a person really wants to be helped. In Freud’s later picture, the individual is not exactly resisting a cure: he wants and holds on to his suffering. With the appearance of the death instinct, the ego has virtually no resources, not even an illusion of agency, however absurd. Often in Freud’s writing, one gets the sense that the life instinct is insufficiently strong to counteract what he refers to as the (silent) workings of the death instinct (it is not of course incidental that Freud formulates the idea of a death instinct towards the end of his life). Increasingly in Freud’s account it becomes a question for the individual of how best to survive the determinisms – the life and death instincts – that are taken to constitute the self.

When Freud writes of the ‘resistances’ to psychoanalytic treatment, he is describing why psychoanalytic treatment is more or less impossible. To describe the patient as resisting the analyst puts the emphasis in the wrong place; it is not that the patient is resisting the analysis but that he wants to suffer. His suffering is his object of desire, not the cure, despite what he says. No agency, no resistance. To resist, oppose or withstand is to have the wherewithal to do something, to ‘act’ in a certain way. Against the tyranny of the life and death instincts, the ego has no real say; he must merely submit to, and at best compromise, their tyranny. Freud’s picture of the individual’s internal predicament is in this sense an accurate transcription of the external political predicament of his times. There was to be no real resistance on the part of individuals to the two cataclysmically destructive world wars, and no real resistance for the Jews to the Holocaust. Resistance, one can say in the aftermath of such catastrophes, is part of the vocabulary of optimism. The best and the worst things are irresistible. And what else would one do with the best and worst things but try to resist them, or eagerly submit.

Once Freud had redescribed and elaborated his idea of the unconscious, resistance became the order of the day. The unconscious makes resistance a necessity. ‘In psychoanalytic treatment,’ Laplanche and Pontalis write in Language of Psychoanalysis,

The name ‘resistance’ is given to everything in the words and actions of the analysand that obstructs his gaining access to his unconscious. By extension, Freud spoke of resistance to psychoanalysis when referring to a hostile attitude towards his discoveries in so far as they exposed unconscious desires and inflicted a ‘psychological blow’ upon man.

Resistance is now integral to the whole psychoanalytic project; if there is, in any sense, an unconscious, there is resistance to it; this is what the unconscious is: that which one resists. So, by this logic, resistance is the surest sign of the acknowledgment of something of real significance. You know something or someone is of value – or rather of significance to you – because you resist them. Whenever resistance is being held accountable in psychoanalysis, it implies choice and intention and a degree of agency, not to mention taste and aesthetic preference (someone is doing the resisting, according to their lights). When one resists something, one is protecting an already existing system of values, of moral and emotional preferences and imperatives, however unconscious. And in this sense resistance is always, as Freud intimates, conservative, because it is conserving something presumed to be of ultimate value. When one is defending against something one is always defending something else. And, paradoxically, when one is resisting something one is keeping oneself in contact with that which one needs to resist.

Once there was what the analyst Paul Gray calls the ‘rather slow acknowledgment that resistances themselves, although not part of the repressed, were in fact unconscious’, then psychoanalysis involved not only the making conscious of unconscious desire but also the making conscious of unconscious resistances to this desire.

We have to know what we are resisting, and that we are resisting; and this means being curious rather than anxiously impressionistic about what we are tempted to resist and noticing that resisting is what we are actually doing rather than, say, being ourselves or being very discriminating. And this, of course, is what psychoanalysis is for as a treatment. It says, at its most extreme, that what you call living your life, or being yourself, or doing what you can is in fact living in a state of hyper-vigilant resistance. That, if you accept Freud’s description of the unconscious, then resisting is not something you do occasionally, or in certain recognisable situations, but something you need to do all the time. Freudian men and women live in a state of continuous emergency, always potentially threatened by overwhelming, unpredictable and often unrecognisable, largely unconscious desires. It is, of course, an absurd picture when it isn’t a disturbing one. But what it means, if and when we are not living in the cult of resistance, is that we may wonder what a non-persecutory unconscious would be like; or what a picture or a story about so-called human nature would be like that was not antagonistic and conflictual, in which we are not taken to be the sworn enemies of our own nature. Or we might want a different story about the nature of resistance.

It was the idea of development in what became known as object relations, in a sense initiated by Ferenczi – relationship privileged over gratification, development preferred to sensual gratification – that was, for better and for worse, the psychoanalytic attempt to save us from ourselves, or, rather, from ourselves as Freud and some of his followers described us. It was clearly unpromising, from a psychoanalytic point of view, to think of ourselves now – in these times and in these places – as flourishing, in the way Aristotle did. Or to think of a life, again in classical terms, justified and enjoyed as the pursuit of a sovereign good (Lacan is explicit and insistent that there is no sovereign good, and that such fantasies are no longer viable ways of holding us or keeping us together; Winnicott, although he doesn’t and wouldn’t put it like this, seems to believe that individual development is our sovereign good, if a very ambiguous kind of sovereign good). Resistance is the heart of the matter, at least for Freud and his immediate followers, because human beings, unlike other animals, are essentially resistant to their nature and so attack it.

What the Aristotelian philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre describes as the person growing up, coming ‘to understand what good in fact is’, sounds, at least in a psychoanalytic context, unduly naive; the phrase ‘what the good in fact is’ now seems something that many of us would resist, or at least question. But if, in fact, you have no real idea of what the good is, then what else will you, or can you, know? Resistance at least implies that there is a good one knows and wants to protect, even if it doesn’t imply that you know you could be wrong. And it may be in the working through of resistance in psychoanalytic treatment – and the working through of Freud’s grim view of resistance – that one might discover something about the good in life that one might value.

‘In the course of the analysis,’ Ferenczi writes in his 1928 paper, ‘The Elasticity of Psychoanalytic Technique’, ‘it is as well to keep one eye constantly open for [the patient’s] unconscious expressions of rejection or disbelief and to bring them remorselessly into the open. It is only to be expected that the patient’s resistance should leave unexploited no single opportunity for expressing these.’ The patient, it is assumed, is unrelentingly resistant to the treatment; and it is this unrelenting resistance that the analyst must above all attend to. In this paper, Ferenczi gives an account of, and accounts for, the patient’s inevitable and unavoidable resistance to psychoanalytic treatment, but as a precondition for, rather than an obstacle to, the patient’s positive and eventually helpful relationship with the analyst. Resistance is not the problem but the point. In Ferenczi’s account, the obstacle becomes the instrument; where Freud became increasingly gloomy and despondent about the power of the patient’s resistances to sabotage and discredit psychoanalysis, Ferenczi – far less sceptical than Freud about psychoanalytic ‘technique’ – insisted that it was precisely the patient’s resistances, and the way the analyst approached them, that both facilitated and confirmed the efficacy of psychoanalysis. It was because the patient was allowed and encouraged to resist the treatment that the treatment worked. As if to say, the patient needs to acknowledge and articulate all his suspicions, misgivings, doubts, criticisms, prejudices and loathings – his hatred in other words – of the analyst and of analysis before he can arrive at his appreciation of the treatment. The analyst should not dismantle or try to free the patient of his inevitable resistances, but should allow for them, expect them and use them. The psychoanalyst, unlike virtually every other professional practitioner, facilitates and cultivates the most extreme criticism of his practice. It is the patient’s doubts and misgivings about both the treatment and the analyst himself that is the material the analyst works with. In an interesting extension of Descartes’s belief in doubt, the analyst assumes that the patient’s doubts about the treatment and about the analyst himself (taken to be reiterations of doubts about the parents and the self) are what need to be understood and analysed. ‘I have on many other occasions tried to describe,’ Ferenczi writes,

how the analyst must accept for weeks on end the role of an Aunt Sally on whom the patient tries out all his aggressiveness and resentment. If we do not protect ourselves from this, but, on the contrary, encourage the only-too-hesitant patient at every opportunity that presents itself, sooner or later we shall reap the well-deserved reward of our patience in the form of the arrival of the positive transference. Any trace of irritation or offence on the part of the physician only prolongs the duration of the resistance period.

It is as though the patient to begin with puts the analyst through an elaborate kind of test; as if to say to the analyst, ‘if you can survive without retaliation or masochistic guilt and defeat the full blast of my hatred, then I can rely on you as fully accepting of me through your good-natured resilience. Once you have seen and felt my hatred, I can risk my love and hatred, because you have proven that my hatred won’t destroy someone.’ In other words, Ferenczi is proposing here that resistance can be a form of stage fright; that it is a way of entering an uncertain threshold, or transition; a kind of initiation rite for both the patient and the analyst. And that, indeed, resistance may therefore be the necessary precondition for such transitions. That by initially saying no, one is testing the possibility of saying yes. In this story, it is clear that, at least from Ferenczi’s point of view, if there is no initial and initiating resistance there can be no real relationship. And it is not incidental that this extraordinary paper ends with Ferenczi suggesting that the aim of psychoanalytic treatment is

To do away, at any rate temporarily, with any kind of superego, including that of the analyst. The patient should end by ridding himself of any emotional attachment that is independent of his own reason and his own libidinal tendencies. Only a complete dissolution of the superego can bring about a radical cure.

The psychoanalytic process Ferenczi proposes is the gradual overcoming of resistance through the uninhibited articulation of the resistances in all their irrational violence, and the establishing through this voicing of a positive relationship in which all extrinsic morality – the superego – is dissolved. The patient is left with his ‘reason’ (his idiosyncratic and singular intelligence) and his libidinal tendencies (his desire) in all their complexity. Lacan’s moral principle that analysis should, ideally, enable the patient not to betray her own desire is a redescription of Ferenczi’s project. But resistance as research, preparation, examination, curiosity, is the precondition, the starting block, for any possible new and potentially satisfying experience.

Resistance, in Ferenczi’s radical revision of psychoanalysis, prepares the ground for the abolition and the irrelevance of the superego, and so for significant change in the patient. Dissolving the superego means, in Emerson’s words, doing one’s own thing, living one’s life in one’s own way, following one’s inclination and curiosity and refusing to be intimidated, being able to make experiments in living. Not, in Lacan’s language, betraying one’s desire. No resistance, no enlivening future; no resistance, no apparent interest in the future, in pleasure and possibility. So, in this story, it would be the absence of resistance in ourselves and others that should make us wary or should make us at least curious. We need to notice that many of the best things in our lives, about our lives, begin as resistances. Our interest may require what Winnicott calls a ‘period of hesitation’. Because we resist when something is at stake; we resist when something matters to us, even if we don’t always know what it is. We resist when there is the apprehension of excessive pleasure or excessive suffering, or both. But resistance, as Ferenczi intimates, is apprehension and prediction. The patient can only begin psychoanalytic treatment by resisting it: resisting it and trying to find out to what or whom he is entrusting himself.

In this story​ our resistance can be – as Ferenczi suggests – one of the best things about us; it signifies both our desire and our need to do things in our own time, in our own way. Our resistance is central to our singularity. It shows us that desiring is something we can only really do in our own time, partly because we are always tempted to resist desire, or to take refuge in desiring only what others want us to desire. Impatience, Kafka wrote, is our original sin. Our frustration, or our apparent inability to bear it, can make us compliant, what Ferenczi calls ‘polite’. As though compliance is a magic cure for both frustration and impatience, a handing ourselves in to the authorities, the authorities who require us to be well-behaved. Complying is what we do when desiring seems too dangerous and too difficult.

So, when we resist, we are also always resisting compliance – refusing to fit in, refusing to play the game – or trying to find out if we can. Our resistance is like a probe to find out what the analyst – or the other – will make of our resistance, and what this will reveal him to be (authoritarian or kind, say, impatient or flexible). We resist people as a provocation, as a way of getting them to reveal themselves. From a psychoanalytic point of view, resistance is a paradoxical act, distancing people as a way of finding out if we can get close to them, making them cross to find out how kind or accepting they are. In this story, sociability, relationship, exchange – not to mention psychoanalytic treatment – is impossible without resistance. We might say by celebrating resistance, by making the case for it (as Ferenczi does more enthusiastically than Freud), psychoanalysis radically redescribes resistance as essential to exchange, to sociability and therefore essential to development. Of course, resistance always runs the risk of degenerating into stubbornness, or arrogance, or revenge, or grudge or dismissal. But as long as it initiates a process – the process Ferenczi so vividly outlines – rather than pre-empting it, psychoanalysis can show us how and why resistance is the one thing we should not resist.