When our words disturb the psychoanalytic process: From resistance as a defense to resistance as an interactive process

Abstract

Words that “touch’ are closely related to words that “jar.” This article faces the problem of micro- and macrotraumatic effects in psychoanalytic interpretation, using the theme of resistance as a guideline. If it is true that resistance is what blocks psychoanalytic comprehension and progress in clinical work, it is equally true that it provides elements for clinically organizing the psychoanalytic dialogue. Being attentive to the signals in the field, and making use of a greater dose of attention to communicating with the patient, one can try to reduce the “jarring” effect of interpretation. On the other hand, it is also true that this is probably a phenomenon that follows ineluctably from the very nature of psychic experience. To interpret resistance correctly, we must therefore view it not as negative viscosity opposing change but as a safety valve for the individual's identity, enabling one to negotiate between old and new patterns of experience. In this sense, it is not something concerning only the patient but is also a bi-personal problem that requires both intra- and interpsychic conceptualizing. Resistance is a problem that can only be effectively faced by recognizing that it is inevitably present in the couple.

Keywords:

• Resistance
• error
• interpretation
• trauma
• paradox

Notes

¹“So there is nothing absolute about the empirical basis of objective science. Science is not constructed on a foundation of rock. The entire edifice … is built upon a marsh. Its foundations are piles sunk into mud: not deeply enough to touch solid ground that is naturally there but sufficiently far in to hold the building up. We decide to rely on the solidity of the piles, not because we give up trying to bang them further in nor because they have reached a solid layer, but because we hope that, anyway, the piles will continue to support the building.” The image of the marsh, the piles and the palisade is not far from Freud's repertoire of metaphors. The marshland reminds us of the famous image of the reclaimed Zuidersee (Freud, 1938).

²For Giaconia, Pellizzari, and Rossi (1997), the analysis is sparked off by some disturbing element in the patient's discourse, which becomes the Bionian “selected fact” that the analyst selects as significant and dissonant. Subsequently, the analyst's intervention is constructed as a more or less direct and explicit way of addressing the emerging emotional fact. He or she offers the patient an emotive-cognitive container, which aims to increase the thinkableness of the analysand's experience. The repetitive cycle, fuelled by compulsion to repeat and the death instinct, is interrupted by what Kleinians and post-Kleinians would call the “drive for meaning.” Communication between patient and analyst follows a to-and-fro pattern, which gives the exchange a characteristic spirality of form and definite reciprocity in its progress (Bokanowski, 2004; Canestri, 2004; Petrella, 2004). Giaconia et al. (1997, pp. 125, 126–127) write: “What lets the analyst avoid twinning himself with the patient, what helps him avoid a sort of physiological collusion with his mental functioning in that situation, is that a dissonant element emerges, incongruous with the affective, communicative context, which indicates the crisis state of that context. The context is made semantically unstable by this dissonance and requires rethinking in a different way …. We suggest using the word ‘perturbation’ to indicate this critical moment that indicates passage from one container to another.” The result of this process is never definitive but throws up a new container mediating between love/hate and narcissism/altruism. This can in turn repeatedly stagnate or flexibly expand, enabling the psyche to develop.