ABSTRACT
This chapter interprets the short story Bartleby the Scrivener, by Herman Melville, as a fictional case of defiant resistance, which some patients develop to fend off external demands experienced as intolerable impingements. Resistance is encountered in psychotherapy in many different forms and can be seen as a survival strategy. Works of fiction are a gold-mine for therapists, as they often describe characters whose behaviour and personalities resemble the psychopathology of clinical cases. Before the invention of psychoanalysis, fictional narratives provided glimpses and interpretations of the unconscious processes in the inner world and of the complexity of emotional conflict, object relations, and individual psychopathology. The life stories of fictitious heroes and villains can help their readers recognize something of themselves in these others, and they demonstrate universal truths about complex psychological structures.
