In psychoanalysis, resistance is the individual's efforts to prevent repressed drives, feelings or thoughts from being integrated into conscious awareness.
[2] In an early exposition of his new technique, Freud wrote that there is "another point of view which you may take up in order to understand the psychoanalytic method.
If you succeed in persuading him to accept, by virtue of a better understanding, something that up to now, in consequence of this automatic regulation by pain, he has rejected (repressed), you will then have accomplished something towards his education ... Psychoanalytic treatment may in general be conceived of as such a re-education in overcoming internal resistances".
[11][12] The compromise the two competing parties strive for is to achieve maximum drive satisfaction with minimum resultant pain (negative reactions from within and without).
Any line of investigation, no matter what its direction, which recognizes these two facts and takes them as the starting-point of its work may call itself psychoanalysis, though it arrives at results other than my own".
[16] Indeed, to this day most major schools of psychotherapeutic thought continue to at least recognize, if not "take as the starting-point", the two phenomena of transference and resistance.
Subsequently, the patient may suddenly tend to regard the therapist in either a positive or negative manner, depending upon the nature of the past influence.
Usually, it involves the patient's attempts to gain attention and sympathy by emphasizing minor medical symptoms (i.e. headaches, nausea, and depression).
Since the id is an innate portion of human instinct, interpretation of the conscious is an insufficient method, thus the psychoanalyst must first be able to surmount resistances by the means of deduction of patients' unconscious defenses that are presented through exploitation of the mechanism of transference.
[21] As Freud's clinical practice progressed, he noticed how, even when his patients' conscious minds had accepted the existence of, and begun working through their neurotic patterns, they still had to deal with what he called Id resistance: "the resistance of the unconscious...the power of the compulsion to repeat – the attraction exerted by the unconscious prototypes upon the repressed instinctual process".
[24] W. R. D. Fairbairn saw id resistance in terms of early attachment to an internalised bad object, so that the individual remained bound by ties of yearning towards, and anger at rejection by, the repudiating parent of childhood.
[28] Eric Berne saw personality in terms of a life-script laid down in early childhood, and considered that the main obstacle to recovery in therapy "is the pull of the script, something like the Id resistance of Freud".
[34] Where the ego ideal is harshly perfectionist, or represents an internalised mother who idealised suffering over enjoyment,[35] superego resistance takes the form of a refusal to be 'corrupted' by the progress of the therapy.
As resistance is theorized to be a manifestation of the unconscious mind's attempts to protect the ego, it is the task of the psychoanalyst to combat this opposition by directing the patient to confront the unacceptable desires or uncomfortable memories.