ABSTRACT
To some extent, psychoanalytic psychotherapists agree with Freud, who held that all progress in psychotherapeutic technique hinges on the increasingly accurate evaluation of resistance. The clinical phenomenon of resistance came to light by Freud's technical innovation in the treatment of neurosis with patients not amenable to hypnosis. Freud urged that they produce memories of what had originally occasioned their symptoms. For Freud, aversive nonconscious truth set resistance into play - the archeological, buried, "repressed impulses". The goal of psychoanalytic treatment was to bring such truth to self-conscious emotional awareness: "to bring to the patient knowledge of unconscious, repressed impulses existing in him, and, for that purpose, to uncover the resistances that oppose this extension of his knowledge about himself". The initial phase found members sharing the historical and geographical, while forestalling the psychological. Resistance is immediate, a response to those aspects of present reality that are feared as painful.
