Obsessional patients are exceedingly clever at making the technical rule almost useless by bringing their over-conscientiousness and doubt to bear upon it. Patients with anxiety-hysteria sometimes succeed in reducing it to absurdity by only producing associations which are so far removed from what is wanted that they yield nothing for analysis. However, I do not intend to introduce you to these technical difficulties of the treatment. It is enough to know that finally, with resolution and perseverance, we do succeed in extracting from the patient a certain amount of obedience for the rule of the technique; and then the resistance takes another line altogether. It appears as intellectual opposition, employs arguments as weapons, and turns to its own use all the difficulties and improbabilities which normal but uninstructed reasoning finds in analytical doctrines. We then have to hear from the mouth of the individual patient all the criticisms and objections which thunder about us in chorus in scientific literature. What the critics outside shout at us is nothing new, therefore. It is indeed a storm in a teacup. Still, the patient can be argued with; he is very glad to get us to instruct him, teach him, defeat him, point out the literature to him so that he can learn more; he is perfectly ready to become a supporter of psycho-analysis on the condition that analysis shall spare him personally. We recognize resistance in this desire for knowledge, however; it is a digression from the particular task in hand and we refuse to allow it. In the obsessional neurosis the resistance makes use of special tactics which we are prepared for. It permits the analysis to proceed uninterruptedly along its course, so that more and more light is thrown upon the problems of the case, until we begin to wonder at last why these explanations have no practical effect and entail no corresponding improvement in the symptoms. Then we discover that the resistance has fallen back upon the doubt characteristic of the obsessional neurosis and is holding us successfully at bay from this vantage-point. The patient has said to himself something of this kind: “This is all very pretty and very interesting. I should like to go on with it. I am sure it would do me a lot of good if it were true. But I don’t believe it in the least, and as long as I don’t believe it, it doesn’t affect my illness.” So it goes on for a long time, until at last this reservation itself is reached and then the decisive battle begins.