Occupation and analytic psychotherapy

pp. 142-162

in: Uri Hadar, Psychoanalysis and social involvement, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013

Abstract

The notion of resistance defines practices which, on the face of it, polarize between psychoanalytic and post-colonial approaches to the rehabilitation of subject positioning. This is so even though both examine the relevant issues from a similar perspective, namely, that of being-a-subject. While in psychoanalysis, of course, being-a-subject relates to the individual, post-colonial theory addresses the subject qua group. But while post-colonial practices are directed at the oppressor and the state of oppression, psychoanalytic practices are directed at repression, namely, the mental processes that ensure that certain ideas — memories, fantasies and so on — are kept out of the patient's consciousness. This difference between manifest action (resistance to occupation) and wholly internal dynamics (overcoming repression) would seem to erase the possibility that the notion of resistance refers to similar processes (the rehabilitation of being a subject). Freud, however, already spoke about resistance not only as an internal state but also — and perhaps even mainly — as actions aimed at the therapist and the therapeutic process in so far as they function as the stage on which the relations between consciousness and unconsciousness are played out. For instance, in the radical approach to interpretation that Freud proposed as part of the topographical model, it is only the resistance that the therapist interprets.