The Forward Edge of Resistance: Toward the Dignity of Human Agency

Abstract

Psychoanalysts have traditionally viewed the patient’s resistance as an obstacle to treatment progress. In this paper, I will view resistance in relation to the primary asymmetry built into the treatment relationship with regard to help seeking – patients are help seekers and analysts are designated helpers. More specifically, since there is an ethical privilege and power derived from the self-confidence in providing help to another person, there is a subtle hierarchical subject-object relationship that emerges from the relative dignity or indignity with regard to help-seeking. In this view, resistance is seen as the patient’s attempt to reclaim the dignity of his/her agency as a human subject. Since the patient often feels stymied by a fatalistic inertia in living his/her life, the patient’s resistance of “I Won’t,” instead of a fatalistic “I Can’t,” provides a pathway for the analyst to respect the patient’s resistance as a manifestation of the patient’s need for self-determination.

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Peter Shabad

Peter Shabad, Ph.D., is Clinical Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Northwestern University Medical School. He is on the Faculty of the Chicago Center for Psychoanalysis and Faculty of the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis. Dr. Shabad is co-editor of The Problem of Loss and Mourning: Psychoanalytic Perspectives (IUP, 1989) and is the author of Despair and the Return of Hope: Echoes of Mourning in Psychotherapy (Aronson, 2001). Dr. Shabad is currently working on a new book entitled Seizing The Vital Moment: Passion, Shame, and Mourning to be published by Routledge. Dr. Shabad has a private practice in Chicago in psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic therapy.