A General Introduction to PsychoanalysisFreud, Sigmund
Science
A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis
Freud, Sigmund
Psychoanalysis
The intellectual resistances are not the worst, one can always get ahead
of them. But the patient can also put up resistances, within the limits
of the analysis, whose conquest belongs to the most difficult tasks of
our technique. Instead of recalling, he actually goes again through the
attitudes and emotions of his previous life which, by means of the
so-called "transference," can be utilized as resistances to the
physician and the treatment. If the patient is a man, he takes this
material as a rule from his relations to his father, in whose place he
now puts the physician, and in so doing constructs a resistance out of
his struggle for independence of person and opinion; out of his ambition
to equal or to excel his father; out of his unwillingness to assume the
burden of gratitude a second time in his life. For long times at a
stretch one receives the impression that the patient desires to put the
physician in the wrong and to let him feel his helplessness by
triumphing over him, and that this desire has completely replaced his
better intention of making an end to his sickness. Women are adepts at
exploiting, for the purposes of the resistance, a tender, erotically
tinged transference to the physician. When this leaning attains a
certain intensity, all interest for the actual situation of the
treatment is lost, together with every sense of the responsibility which
was assumed by undertaking it. The never-failing jealousy as well as the
embitterment over the inevitable repudiation, however gently effected,
all must serve to spoil the personal understanding between patient and
physician and thus to throw out one of the most powerful propelling
forces of the analysis.
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