Resistance

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The concept of resistance, meaning literally to stand against, entered the social sciences primarily from politics and culture. While there is a clinical psychoanalytic definition of the term, and a technical one used by the physical sciences, it is really resistance in a critical politico-cultural sense that has had the greatest impact in the field.

Resistance in a political context is often thought of as the property of the left. The famed French (and often communist-led) Résistance against the Nazi occupation immediately comes to mind. But the concept was first introduced into the modern political lexicon from the right, by Edmund Burke, who argued for the necessity of resisting revolutionary “progress” in his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). Burke was incensed at the French overthrow of birthright authority and the leveling of classes (he was particularly horrified by the thought of the hairdresser who thinks himself the equal of his betters). These, and other such revolutionary abuses, fly in the face of time-tested tradition and threaten to upset the natural order of things. As such, it is the “best wisdom and the first duty” of every Englishman to stand against such radical change, with “jealous, ever-waking vigilance” (p. 54).

The conservative call for a resistance against change was taken up by Burke’s countryman Matthew Arnold. By the mid-nineteenth century the republican ideals of the French revolution had the lead over Burke’s beloved tradition, and nature, after Darwin, was harnessed to progress. A new principle of resistance was needed—and for Arnold, it was culture. As “the best that has ever been thought and said” (as he defines it in Culture and Anarchy, 1869), culture offered a means with which to rise above the politics, commerce, and industry of the day and supply a universal standard upon which to base authority and order.

Karl Marx, exiled in England when Arnold was writing, also thought resistance a conservative ideal. In their 1848 Communist Manifesto Marx and Engels paint a heady portrait of dynamic change: traditions overthrown, nature transformed, nations dissolved, people uprooted; a world where “all that is solid melts into air” (p. 38). For Marx, resistance is not the answer—it’s the problem. It is capitalism’s bourgeois caretakers who are resisting the system’s own logic. Capitalism has socialized the means of production, yet ownership is kept in the hands of the few. The revolutionary solution is to tear asunder this final resistance and herald in the new world.

Resistance moved leftward with the anticolonial struggles of the twentieth century. Mohandas K. Gandhi, waging a battle against British rule in India, advocated a political philosophy of satyagraha. In Sanskrit this word means “insistence on the truth,” but Gandhi also used it to denote “civil resistance.” This conflation of meanings makes a certain sense, as for Gandhi it was the untruths of colonial rule—that power must rest upon violence, that English culture comprised the “best that has ever been thought and said”—that needed to be resisted more fiercely than even the British themselves. To be free of European bodies on Indian soil was one thing; to be free of their ideas, their prejudices, and their technology was another. Drawing upon both Burke and Arnold, but turning these ideas on their head, Gandhi advised the practice of civil disobedience, not merely in the streets, but through a political and spiritual return to traditional Indian culture and practices like khaddar, the hand-looming of cloth.

Radical resistance, defined in part as the rejection of foreign cultures and the celebration of indigenous traditions, spread across the globe as European colonies in Africa and Asia were overturned by struggles of national liberation. Gandhi’s strategy of nonviolent civil disobedience was not adopted by all. The Caribbean psychiatrist-cum-rebel Frantz Fanon made the case for bloody resistance in his influential The Wretched of the Earth (1963). Indeed, for Fanon it is the very violence of the resistance that will clear the way to a new society. But for all their differences, Gandhi and Fanon agreed on one thing: that the enemy that one had to resist the most virulently was the enemy one had internalized—what the Tunisian writer and activist Albert Memmi referred to in his 1957 book The Colonizer and the Colonized as “the colonizer within.”

The concept of resistance returned to the West via concerns with identity and identity-construction. In the early 1960s the American sociologist Erving Goffman argued that the job of total institutions like prisons, hospitals, and armies is to create—or recreate—their charge’s identity in order to integrate them into the system. However, Goffman observes, the patients in the mental institution he studied actually formed their identities by eliding institutional demands and creating “underlives” within the institution. In brief, it is in resisting the definitions pressed upon them that inmates of institutions develop their own sense of identity: “It is against something that the self can emerge” (p. 320). Goffman’s book, Asylums (1961), was not merely a critique of total institutions, but a critical assessment of the postwar “Free World” of big business and the welfare state, mass media, and compulsory education—a mostly benign, but nonetheless totalizing system.

It was in resistance to this benign totality—the tickytacky little boxes where everyone comes out all the same, as Pete Seeger sang in 1962—that a youth counterculture emerged in the 1960s, as young people created “under-lives” by defining themselves against The System. Some of this resistance was political—opposition to the American war in Vietnam, for instance—but it was also a stylistic confrontation: new styles of clothes, forms of music, and types of intoxicants. In other words, it was cultural resistance.

The idea, and ideal, of cultural resistance, while first championed by Matthew Arnold, takes its radical articulation from the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci. Gramsci held that hegemony is both a political and cultural process and thus part of the revolutionary project is to create a counterhegemonic culture. But if this culture is to have real power, and radical integrity, it cannot—contra Arnold—be imposed from above; it must come out of the experiences and consciousness of “the people.” Thus, the job of the revolutionary is to discover the progressive potentialities that reside within popular consciousness and from this material fashion a culture of resistance.

It was this implicit politico-cultural mission that guided the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at the University of Birmingham in the 1970s. The CCCS is best known for its study of subcultures, and it was within mainly working class subcultures—punks, mods, skinheads, and Rastafarians—that researchers found an inchoate culture of resistance. For Stuart Hall and his CCCS colleagues, however, cultural resistance was politically ambiguous. Subcultures opened up spaces where dominant ideology was contested and counter-hegemonic culture was created; at the same time, these contestations and symbolic victories often remained purely cultural, leaving the political and economic systems untouched. Cultural resistance, unless translated into political action, becomes what Hall and others referred to as “imaginary” solutions to real-world problems (Hall 1976).

This raises a nagging question that dogs the whole project of politico-cultural resistance : Is this resistance really resistance at all? The efficacy of cultural resistance has been questioned since at least 1934, when Malcolm Cowley, reminiscing about his Greenwich Village life in Exile’s Return, pointed out that while bohemians may have flouted Victorian values of thrift and savings, their libertinism and emphasis on style and innovation mesh quite nicely with the needs of consumer capitalism. As the Frankfurt School theorist Theodor Adorno snidely remarked about the jazz fan of the era, “he pictures himself as the individualist who whistles at the world. But what he whistles is its melody” (Adorno 1938, p. 298). Resistance as a political strategy also has its critics. Resistance only exists in relation to the dominant power—“bonds of rejection” is what Richard Sennett calls this relationship in his discussion of Authority (1985)— and without that dominant power, resistance has no coherence or purpose. What, then, is the point of resistance if it rests on the maintenance of the very thing being resisted?

Michel Foucault, like his contemporary Erving Goffman, studied total institutions—prisons, asylums, and schools—but the French intellectual was interested in institutions of the mind as well: disciplinary boundaries and classification systems. The failures of radical political resistance in 1968 confirmed what Foucault had already known: that power was not something “out there”—easy to identify and overthrow. Instead, it was everywhere, continuous, anonymous, intimate, and even pleasurable: “the disciplinary grid of society” (p. 111), as he names it in Power/Knowledge (1980). For most critics, the individual subject/self is the hero of resistance against totalizing control; Foucault countered that the subject itself was problematic. The Enlightenment’s focus on the subject allowed for new ideals of personal freedom, but it also opened up new sites of oppression: the individual’s mind, body, and spirit. Because power is impressed upon and internalized in the subject, it raises a vexing problem: Who is it that resists and what exactly are they resisting? Can one resist the very subject doing the resisting? Resistance remains a stated goal for Foucault, but one that must be reconceptualized. The ideal of developing the pure subject in opposition to the corrupting object of society must be rejected. “Maybe the target nowadays,” he suggests in “The Subject and Power” (1984), “is not to discover what we are, but to refuse what we are” (p. 208).

This idea of resistance is played out to its—perhaps illogical—conclusion by the playful postmodernist Jean Baudrillard. In his 1985 essay “The Masses: The Implosion of the Social in the Media,” Baudrillard argues that strategies of resistance always change to reflect strategies of control. Against a system that excludes or represses the individual, the natural demand is one of inclusion: to become a subject. Today, however, people are bombarded with appeals for their participation—and yet they still feel that their choice or vote matters little. Against a system that justifies and sustains its existence by the political consent (or consumer purchases) of those it governs, the masses have devised a new strategy of resistance: apathy, “a massive desisting from will” (p. 109). A resistance to resistance.

Another path taken has been to move beyond resistance—to reimagine identities and politics not tied to the negation of the other. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri sketch a bleak portrait of an all-pervasive, omnipotent system of control: Empire (2000). They acknowledge that within such a system, political and cultural resistance is usually expressed in a generalized “being-against”—a negative resistance. Yet they also see the chance for something different. They argue, like Marxists before them, that the system itself is generating the very tools and social conditions that make transcendence possible. The system of Empire relies upon new communication flows, new forms of organization, and new subjectivities—all of which might give rise to radical identities, ideals, and collective actions not mired in the negation of being-against, thereby offering the subjectivity necessary for proactive social change, that is: a “being-for.” The boldest, and perhaps most outrageous, proposal to move beyond resistance comes from the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek who, drawing upon ideas of Jacques Lacan in The Ticklish Subject (1999), proposes something he calls “the Act”—a radical act that jumps outside the coordinates of the dominant system, including any opposition tied to these coordinates. This act transcends resistance and its attendant disobedient obedience—but one might also legitimately ask: Where does an act like this lead?

SEE ALSO Colonialism; Cultural Studies; Fanon, Frantz; Foucault, Michel; Gandhi, Mohandas K.; Goffman, Erving; Gramsci, Antonio; Hall, Stuart; Marx, Karl; Marxism

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Adorno, Theodor. 1938. “On the Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression of Listening.” In Cultural Resistance Reader, ed. Stephen Duncombe, 275–303. New York and London: Verso, 2002.

Arnold, Matthew. 1869. Culture and Anarchy. Ed. J. Dover Wilson. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Baudrillard, Jean. 1985. “The Masses: The Implosion of the Social in the Media.” In Cultural Resistance Reader, Ed. Stephen Duncombe, 100–113. New York and London: Verso, 2002.

Burke, Edmund. 1790. Reflections on the Revolution in France. Ed. L. G. Mitchell. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993.

Cowley, Malcolm. 1934. Exile’s Return: A Literary Odyssey of the 1920s. London: Penguin, 1976.

Duncombe, Stephen, ed. 2002. Cultural Resistance Reader. New York and London: Verso.

Fanon, Frantz. 1963. The Wretched of the Earth. Trans. Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press.

Foucault, Michel. 1980. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977. Ed. Colin Gordon; trans. Colin Gordon et al. New York: Pantheon.

Foucault, Michel. 1982. “The Subject and Power.” In Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, ed. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, 208–226. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Gandhi, M. K. 1919. Hind Swaraj; or, Indian Home Rule. Madras, India: Ganesh/Nationalist Press.

Goffman, Erving. 1961. Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates. New York: Anchor.

Gramsci, Antonio. 1929–1935. Prison Notebooks. Ed. Quinton Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith. New York: International Publishers, 1971.

Hall, Stuart, and Tony Jefferson, eds. 1976. Resistance through Rituals: Youth Cultures in Post-War Britain. London: Unwin Hyman.

Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. 2000. Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Marx, Karl, and Frederick Engels. 1848. The Communist Manifesto. Trans. Samuel Moore. New York and London: Verso, 1998.

Memmi, Albert. 1957. The Colonizer and the Colonized. Trans. Howard Greenfield. New York: Beacon Press, 1991.

Sennett, Richard. 1980. Authority. New York: Norton.

ŽiŽek, Slavoj. 1999. The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology. London and New York: Verso.

Stephen Duncombe

resistance. In every country occupied by Axis forces there was some degree of resistance to occupation, although, in spite of the myth to the contrary, there was never any continent-wide resistance movement, either in Europe or in Asia; each country reacted according to its own historical experience. At first in some countries almost everybody, in others almost nobody, undertook a task that was always dangerous, always illegal, and always the object of special vigilance by the occupying powers. Experience of occupation brought its own lessons, usually harsh. More and more people joined in resistance everywhere, as the time of liberation approached.

Resisters came from every class in society. Railway workers in western Europe may be picked out as a single sub-class with an unusually high share of resisters, but even they had collaborators and German staff mixed up among them.

1. Active resistance

Scholars continue to debate about how resisters should be categorized. Three main active tasks stand out: collecting intelligence about the other side (see also spies); helping others to escape (see also MI9); and sabotage of the war effort (see also subversive warfare). Sabotage could range from pinprick attacks on individual weapons or machines to full-scale onslaughts on formed bodies of troops. It could extend also to moral sabotage, exercised through clandestine publishing or the circulation of rumour, and might merge eventually into insurrection.

Several Allied secret services such as SOE were eager to assist in these tasks, sometimes with political objects in mind. On the occupied spot, few resisters bothered about spymasters' rules which laid down that each task was to be undertaken by separate groups. Enthusiasts were prepared to tackle several tasks in a night, or even at once, if they thought doing so would do the occupiers harm. Trained professionals, sent in from outside to curb their enthusiasm, were rare, and to the professional policemen of the Axis security services they were often easy prey. It was natural to talk, even to boast, to one's friends about what one was doing to help get rid of the invaders, particularly in those countries that had no recent experience of being occupied (unlike the Poles). Careless talk of this kind could easily be overheard, and come to the wrong ears. When captured, some former resisters turned double agent, thus making trouble for their more loyal friends.

Anyone who was in this business for more than a few hours realized how secret it had to be. Sensible resisters wrote down as little as they could, and trusted nobody they had not known well before the war began. women were of great use, not only as couriers, but also in the organizing and leading of resistance groups (see Witherington, for example); this was one of the spheres in which they again proved their right to combatant status and to equality with men.

Courage, swiftness of decision, discretion, patience, and steadiness of purpose were indispensable qualities in a successful resister; to be observant and inconspicuous helped. Above all, resisters (like generals) needed luck.

Sometimes they were able to collect in sizeable bodies, clear of Axis police influence (see maquis, for example), but as a rule they had to have some cover job, in town or country, and conduct resistance work instead of sleeping. Often they became involved with gangs of criminals; for example, they needed first-class forgers to provide them with papers to enable them to pass through control points, which were legion. Black markets, often encouraged by the Gestapo in German-occupied countries, sometimes involved resisters; sometimes they found themselves robbing tobacconists or banks; criminals occasionally went into resistance, for criminal reasons. Nevertheless, post-war myth has exalted resisters into national heroes and heroines, for the most part, and revisionist history has not dented the myth severely.

See also resistance section of relevant major powers.

M. R. D. Foot

2. Passive resistance

Resistance movements in the Second World War assumed some forms which were non-violent in character: strikes, go-slows, demonstrations, nonco-operation, symbolic acts of loyalty to the legitimate government, running underground information services, and hiding wanted people or helping them to escape. These actions have generally attracted less attention than armed struggle, yet they played an important part in the politics of the occupied countries, and contributed to the overall effect of resistance. Often they fall within the category of civil resistance as a political technique: only exceptionally were they a product of a general ethic of non-violence.

In Norway, after the German invasion of April 1940 (see Norwegian campaign), resistance came to be headed by two organizations: Milorg, concerned above all with military supplies, training, and co-operation with Allied military forces outside the country; and Sivorg, which (along with many ordinary peacetime organizations) played an important role in organizing civil resistance. The division of labour between these two bodies was never complete, and there was some overlapping of military and civil resistance. From the start of the occupation, the widespread antipathy to the occupying power and its Norwegian supporters was demonstrated in ‘cold-shoulder’ attitudes and small acts of defiance. From 1941 onwards, various organizations—the clergy, teachers, and others—led extensive non-co-operation against attempts to impose National Socialist ideas and practices. Throughout they stressed that their actions were in accord with international law, especially the 1907Hague Conventions. Despite threats and deportations, their solidarity was not broken, and the power of the regime was effectively limited. The Norwegian Nazi leader Vidkun Quisling conceded the point when he had to abandon his plan for a ‘State Assembly’, and, in an outburst in May 1942, said: ‘It is you teachers who are to blame . . .’

In Denmark, also occupied in April 1940, strikes and demonstrations became widespread, often in conjunction with acts of violent sabotage. In October 1943, when Berlin ordered the arrest of Denmark's several thousand Jews, a tip-off from the German shipping attaché prompted the resistance's escape service to organize their transport across the Sound to Sweden: fewer than 500 fell into German hands.

In the Netherlands, occupied in May 1940, many aspects of the resistance had a civilian character, especially as most of the Dutch realized that in their small and crowded country, with its lack of adequate cover, armed resistance was not likely to be successful. There was no large-scale sabotage, no Maquis, and no armed revolt such as the Paris and Warsaw risings. However, there were three mass strikes: in February 1941, against the arrests of Jews; in spring 1943, against a call-up of former prisoners-of-war for forced labour in Germany; and in September 1944, on the railways, to frustrate German counter-measures against the landings of Allied troops (see MARKET-GARDEN). The Germans took harsh reprisals, especially severe in 1944 when there was widespread famine, and the strikes did not lead to much improvement in German policy, but they did contribute powerfully to a Dutch sense of solidarity.

In France, occupied in June 1940, perhaps the most effective actions in the field of unarmed resistance were those of the railway workers. In the summer of 1944, at the time of the Normandy landings (see OVERLORD), the railways were of very limited use to the German forces: a German survey conceded that it was not so much the damage by Allied air forces, nor the incessant demolitions by those waging subversive warfare, of saboteurs, that made the railways unworkable, as the permanent attitude of non-co-operation and go-slow of the railway staff.

In other Axis-occupied countries non-co-operation in various forms was a significant part of resistance. In one case, Luxembourg, the inhabitants took advantage of a Nazi-organized plebiscite in 1941 to vote 97% against the occupation. However, where (as in China, Bohemia and Moravia, Poland, the USSR, and Yugoslavia) the occupation regime was especially harsh, and was based upon doctrines of national expansion and racial superiority, non-co-operation generally assumed covert forms: failure to carry out orders efficiently, go-slows, underground activities of various kinds.

In some Axis or pro-Axis countries there were important acts or movements of civil resistance, especially against deportations. For example, in Germany, attempts in Berlin in 1943 to deport Jews who were married to non-Jews met with spontaneous demonstrations, mainly by the wives of those arrested: the deportations were stopped. In Bulgaria in the same year, mass opposition to deportations of Jews led the fascist government to give up its plan to send the Jews of Bulgaria to the death camps (see OPERATION REINHARD).

Before the war or in its early stages, Gandhi—who led the wartime non-violent resistance movement against the British in India (see India, 3)— Aldous Huxley, and many others in Allied countries had seen non-violent resistance as a possible means of effectively opposing military attack and occupation. The events of 1939–45 suggest that such resistance can indeed have an effect, but that it often operates best in conjunction with armed resistance movements. While non-violent civil resistance sometimes emerged quite early in the war—before the great turning-points of El Alamein and Stalingrad—there is no doubt that in many occupied countries it derived strength from the knowledge that the Allied armies were in the field, and from the continued existence of governments-in-exile. On its own, civil resistance was not capable of dislodging a determined occupying power. However, it did sometimes save lives, significantly modify occupation policy, or assist Allied military operations; and in many countries the fact that there had been widespread civil resistance against foreign occupation maintained national self-respect not only during the war, but also long afterwards. See also conscientious objectors.

Adam Roberts

Bibliography

Foot, M. R. D. , Resistance: An Analysis of European Resistance to Nazism 1940–1945 (London, 1977).
Gjelsvik, T. , Norwegian Resistance 1940–1945 (tr. T. K. Derry and and C. Hurst , London, 1979).
Haestrup, J. , Europe Ablaze (Odense, 1976).
Michel, H. , The Shadow War (tr. R. H. Barry , London, 1972).
Roberts, A. (ed.), The Strategy of Civilian Defence: Non-violent Resistance to Aggression (London, 1967).
Sharp, G. , The Politics of Nonviolent Action (Boston, 1973).
Suhl, Y. (ed.), They Fought Back: The Story of the Jewish Resistance in Nazi Europe (London, 1968).

RESISTANCE

Psychoanalysis understands resistance as something that stands in the way of the progress of analytic work during treatment. The term appeared for the first time in Sigmund Freud's writings in the Studies on Hysteria (1895d), where he reported—in connection with the case of Lucy R.—how he had given up testing the degree of hypnosis of his patients because "this roused the patients' resistances and shook their confidence in me, which I needed for carrying out the more important psychical work" (p. 108). During his treatment of Elisabeth von R., already mindful of his own role in the clinical work, Freud perceived this resistance through the efforts he had to make in order to get his patient to remember certain painful representations. In the Freudian psychodynamic approach, this concept refers to the psychic force that the patient opposes to the bringing into consciousness of certain unpleasurable representations during treatment: the psychic force developed to maintain repression.

If the topographical theory led to the idea that psychoanalysis was, in Freud's words, an interpretative art that consisted of making the unconscious conscious, the analyst's task was henceforth to "lead the patient to recognize his resistance and to reckon with it." Analysis of the resistances thus became one of the cornerstones of analytic technique; analysis of the transference was soon linked with it.

In "The Dynamics of Transference" (1912b), Freud wondered why transference, the most effective among the factors of success, could become the most powerful agent of resistance. He was thus led to distinguish between positive and negative transference, and to conclude that "transference to the doctor is suitable for resistance to the treatment only in so far as it is a negative transference or a positive transference of repressed erotic impulses."

Freud agreed that nothing in analysis is more difficult than overcoming the resistances. However, these phenomena are valuable because they make it possible to bring to light patients' secret and forgotten emotions of love; above all, by endowing these with a sense of immediacy, the resistances facilitate the recognition of these emotions, because, as Freud put it in a well-known formulation, "it is impossible to destroy anyone in absentia or in effigie " (1912b, p. 108). Instead of remembering, the patient reproduces attitudes and feelings from his or her life, which, through the transference, can be used as means of resistance against the treatment and against the therapist. It is as if the patient's intention to confound the analyst, make him feel his impotence, triumph over him, becomes more powerful that his or her intention to bring an end to his or her illness.

The article "Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through (Further Recommendations on the Technique of Psycho-Analysis II)"(1914g) marked a turning point where the discovery of repetition compulsion put an end to an illusion: Freud admitted that naming the resistance still did not make it disappear immediately. Analytic technique purported to be an art of interpretation that focused above all on recognizing the resistances and communicating them to the patient. Discovering that "The greater the resistance, the more extensively will acting out (repetition) replace remembering" (p. 151), Freud recognized the importance of the need for working-through (durcharbeiten ) "One must allow the patient time to become more conversant with this resistance with which he has now become acquainted, to work through it, to overcome it, by continuing, in defiance of it, the analytic work according to the fundamental rule of analysis" (p. 155). Freud constantly reiterated that it is the working-through of the resistances that offers the patient the greatest chance of change.

In the chapter "Resistance and Repression" in Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (1916-17 [1915-17]), Freud underscored the forms of the resistances, which are very diversified, extremely refined, and often difficult to recognize, and their protean character—attributes that require the physician to be cautious and to remain on guard against them. Thus, during treatment, phenomena such as gaps in memory, screen-memories, overabundant production of dreams, cessation of free association, avoidance of causal links, judgments about the insignificance of thoughts that come to mind, or even flight into treatment may all be understood as forms of resistance. But it was the most paradoxical forms of resistance—repetition compulsion and the negative therapeutic reaction—which Freud linked to unconscious feelings of guilt, that gave his study of the resistances its full amplitude.

In Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety (1926d), Freud returned to the forms of the resistances and distinguished those of the ego, the id, and the superego. The first type is under the aegis of the pleasure principle and includes three possibilities: resistance to the lifting of repression, resistance to the loss of secondary gains from illness, and transference resistance, which aims to maintain repression. The second, resistance of the id, corresponds to "the power of the compulsion to repeat" (1926d, p. 159) and necessitates working-through. The third, resistance of the superego, comes out of the feeling of guilt and the need for punishment, which stand in the way of successful treatment; this type was later described as a negative therapeutic reaction, itself linked to the death instinct.

If Freud remained reticent on the intrinsic nature of the resistances while underscoring their variability, richness, and solidity, he always believed that the patient's work on his or her own resistances was indispensable to the success of the treatment, even positing in his last writings that this work alone carried in it the potential for real and lasting change in the ego.

Analysts after Freud have done relatively little further work on the manifestations of resistance during treatment. However, Melanie Klein, by seeing resistance essentially as a manifestation of negative transference, paved the way for a certain number of other studies, notably those of Wilfred Bion, who described psychotic resistance as "attacks on linking."

MichÈle Pollak Cornillot

See also: Acting out/acting in; Active technique; "Analysis Terminable and Interminable"; "Autobiographical Study, An"; Cathartic method; Change; Character; "Constructions in Analysis"; Cure; Defense; Development of Psycho-Analysis ; Doubt; Ego; Ego and the Id, The ; Evenly-suspended attention; Face-to-face situation; Fundamental rule; Id; Interpretation; Negative therapeutic reaction; Psychoanalysis of Children, The ; Psychoanalyst; "Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through"; Repressed; Repression, lifting of; Silence; Studies on Hysteria ; Superego; Technique with adults, psychoanalytic; Termintaion of treatment; Therapeutic alliance; Training analysis; Transference; "Wild " Psycho-Analysis ; Working-through.

Bibliography

Bion, Wilfred Ruprecht. (1959). Attacks on linking. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 43 (4-5), 308.

Freud, Sigmund. (1912b). The dynamics of transference. SE, 12: 97-108.

——. (1914g). Remembering, repeating and working-through (further recommendations on the technique of psycho-analysis II). SE, 12: 145-156.

——. (1916-17a [1915-17]). Introductory lectures on psycho-analysis. Parts I and II. SE, 15-16.

——. (1926d [1925]). Inhibitions, symptoms and anxiety. SE, 20: 75-172.

Freud, Sigmund, and Breuer, Josef. (1895d). Studies on hysteria. SE, 2: 48-106.

Further Reading

Busch, Fred. (1995). Resistance analysis and object relations theory. Psychoanalytic Psychology, 12, 43-54.

Gray, Paul. (1992). Memory as resistance, and the telling of a dream. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 40, 307-326.

Smith, Henry F. (1997). Resistance, enactment, and interpretation: A self-analytic study. Psychoanalytic Inquiry, 17, 13-30.

re·sist·ance / riˈzistəns/ • n. 1. the refusal to accept or comply with something; the attempt to prevent something by action or argument: she put up no resistance to being led away. ∎  armed or violent opposition: government forces were unable to crush guerrilla-style resistance. ∎  (also re·sist·ance move·ment) [in sing.] a secret organization resisting authority, esp. in an occupied country. ∎  (the Resistance) the underground movement formed in France during World War II to fight the German occupying forces and the Vichy government. Also called maquis. ∎  the impeding, slowing, or stopping effect exerted by one material thing on another: air resistance would need to be reduced by streamlining. 2. the ability not to be affected by something, esp. adversely: some of us have a lower resistance to cold than others. ∎  Med. & Biol. lack of sensitivity to a drug, insecticide, etc., esp. as a result of continued exposure or genetic change. 3. the degree to which a substance or device opposes the passage of an electric current, causing energy dissipation. Ohm's law resistance (measured in ohms) is equal to the voltage divided by the current. ∎  a resistor or other circuit component that opposes the passage of an electric current. PHRASES: the line (or path) of least resistance an option avoiding difficulty or unpleasantness; the easiest course of action.

resistance property of an electric conductor by which it opposes a flow of electricity and dissipates electrical energy away from the circuit, usually as heat. Optimum resistance is provided by a conductor that is long, small in cross section, and of a material that conducts poorly. Resistance is basically the same for alternating and direct current circuits (see impedance ). However, an alternating current of high frequency tends to travel near the surface of a conductor. Since such a current uses less of the available cross section of the conductor than a direct current, it meets with more resistance than a direct current. In circuit analysis an ideal resistor , i.e., a circuit component whose only property is resistance, is called a resistance. The phenomenon of resistance arises from the interactions of electrons with ions in the conductor. The unit of resistance is the ohm . See superconductivity ; Ohm's law ; conduction .

resistance
1. (in microbiology) The degree to which pathogenic microorganisms remain unaffected by antibiotics and other drugs. Genes for antibiotic resistance are often carried on plasmids or transposons, which can spread across species barriers.

2. (in ecology)
a. The degree to which a pest can withstand the effects of a pesticide. It depends on the selection and spread within a pest population of genes that confer the ability to destroy, or minimize the effects of, a pesticide.

b. See environmental resistance.


3. (in immunology) The degree of immunity to infection that an animal possesses.

resistance refusal to accept or comply with something.
The Resistance is the name given to the underground movement formed in France during the Second World War to fight the German occupying forces and the Vichy government. The Resistance was composed of various groups which were coordinated into the Forces Françaises de l'Intérieur in 1944, which joined with Free French forces in the liberation of Paris and northern France.
the line of least resistance an option avoiding difficulty or unpleasantness; the easiest course of action.

resistance (symbol R) Property of an electric conductor, calculated as the ratio of the voltage applied to the conductor to the current passing through it. Conductors have low resistance. The SI unit of resistance is the ohm. It represents the opposition to the flow of electric current. See also resistor

resistance (ri-zist-ăns) n.
1. the degree of immunity that the body possesses.

2. the degree to which a disease or disease-causing organism remains unaffected by antibiotics or other drugs.

resistance in psychiatry: see psychoanalysis .

resistance in biology: see immunity .

resistance •abeyance, conveyance, purveyance •creance • ambience •irradiance, radiance •expedience, obedience •audience •dalliance, mésalliance •salience •consilience, resilience •emollience • ebullience •convenience, lenience, provenience •impercipience, incipience, percipience •variance • experience •luxuriance, prurience •nescience • omniscience •insouciance • deviance •subservience • transience •alliance, appliance, compliance, defiance, misalliance, neuroscience, reliance, science •allowance •annoyance, clairvoyance, flamboyance •fluence, pursuance •perpetuance • affluence • effluence •mellifluence • confluence •congruence • issuance • continuance •disturbance •attendance, dependence, interdependence, resplendence, superintendence, tendance, transcendence •cadence •antecedence, credence, impedance •riddance • diffidence • confidence •accidence • precedence • dissidence •coincidence, incidence •evidence •improvidence, providence •residence •abidance, guidance, misguidance, subsidence •correspondence, despondence •accordance, concordance, discordance •avoidance, voidance •imprudence, jurisprudence, prudence •impudence • abundance • elegance •arrogance • extravagance •allegiance • indigence •counter-intelligence, intelligence •negligence • diligence • intransigence •exigence •divulgence, effulgence, indulgence, refulgence •convergence, divergence, emergence, insurgence, resurgence, submergence •significance •balance, counterbalance, imbalance, outbalance, valance •parlance • repellence • semblance •bivalence, covalence, surveillance, valence •sibilance • jubilance • vigilance •pestilence • silence • condolence •virulence • ambulance • crapulence •flatulence • feculence • petulance •opulence • fraudulence • corpulence •succulence, truculence •turbulence • violence • redolence •indolence • somnolence • excellence •insolence • nonchalance •benevolence, malevolence •ambivalence, equivalence •Clemence • vehemence •conformance, outperformance, performance •adamance • penance • ordinance •eminence • imminence •dominance, prominence •abstinence • maintenance •continence • countenance •sustenance •appurtenance, impertinence, pertinence •provenance • ordnance • repugnance •ordonnance • immanence •impermanence, permanence •assonance • dissonance • consonance •governance • resonance • threepence •halfpence • sixpence •comeuppance, tuppence, twopence •clarence, transparence •aberrance, deterrence, inherence, Terence •remembrance • entrance •Behrens, forbearance •fragrance • hindrance • recalcitrance •abhorrence, Florence, Lawrence, Lorentz •monstrance •concurrence, co-occurrence, occurrence, recurrence •encumbrance •adherence, appearance, clearance, coherence, interference, perseverance •assurance, durance, endurance, insurance •exuberance, protuberance •preponderance • transference •deference, preference, reference •difference • inference • conference •sufferance • circumference •belligerence • tolerance • ignorance •temperance • utterance • furtherance •irreverence, reverence, severance •deliverance • renascence • absence •acquiescence, adolescence, arborescence, coalescence, convalescence, deliquescence, effervescence, essence, evanescence, excrescence, florescence, fluorescence, incandescence, iridescence, juvenescence, luminescence, obsolescence, opalescence, phosphorescence, pubescence, putrescence, quiescence, quintessence, tumescence •obeisance, Renaissance •puissance •impuissance, reminiscence •beneficence, maleficence •magnificence, munificence •reconnaissance • concupiscence •reticence •licence, license •nonsense •nuisance, translucence •innocence • conversance • sentience •impatience, patience •conscience •repentance, sentence •acceptance • acquaintance •acquittance, admittance, intermittence, pittance, quittance, remittance •assistance, coexistence, consistence, distance, existence, insistence, outdistance, persistence, resistance, subsistence •instance • exorbitance •concomitance •impenitence, penitence •appetence •competence, omnicompetence •inheritance • capacitance • hesitance •Constance • importance • potence •conductance, inductance, reluctance •substance • circumstance •omnipotence • impotence •inadvertence • grievance •irrelevance, relevance •connivance, contrivance •observance • sequence • consequence •subsequence • eloquence •grandiloquence, magniloquence •brilliance • poignance •omnipresence, pleasance, presence •complaisance • malfeasance •incognizance, recognizance •usance • recusance