Resistance vs. Symptom-Relief: while patients often come into therapy to reduce specific symptoms (such as anxiety or phobias), the therapist doesn’t immediately work on these symptoms. (Reich, 1972, p. 46) There are several reasons for this lack of initial attention to symptoms. First, the patient usually has a lack of insight regarding the nature of their “illness.” The patient usually doesn’t describe its frequency of occurrence or its full impact on them. Second, the patient has usually built up an extensive and highly resistant rationalization for their symptoms. They try to make these symptoms somehow seem sensible and “normal” (even though it is hurting them in a deep and sustained manner).
Working on the Resistance: In focusing on the resistance, Reich finds many ways in which to help his patient identify its source. In one case that Reich’ describes, the patient recognizes that he is afraid the analyst will “deprive him of his ideals.” (Reich, 1972, p. 67) As many analysts observe, successful analysis often involves kicking a patient out of Eden.
Our Tin Man, for instance, would be free to fear the many challenges of the Forest. Ensconced in his armor, the Tin Man need make no decisions; he has lived “happily” in this one spot in the forest (a small patch of grass beside the Yellow Brick Road). Another patient was deeply embedded in a “transferred father resistance.” (Reich, 1972, p. 104) The therapist had become the father and the patient wanted no part of his abusive father.
Reich (1972, p. 35) offers the following description regarding how best to address the transference:
In an analysis that is proceeding correctly, it is not long before the first substantial transference resistance arises. To begin with, we must understand why the first significant resistance against the continuation of the analysis is automatically, and in keeping with the legitimacy of the case’s structure, tied in with the relationship to the analyst. . . . At first, the resistance is directed solely against what is repressed, but the patient knows nothing about it, neither that he bears something forbidden in himself nor that he is fending it off. As Freud demonstrated, the resistances themselves are unconscious. But the resistance is an emotional stirring corresponding to an increased expenditure of energy, and for that reason cannot remain buried. Like everything else that is irrationally motivated, this emotional stirring also strives to achieve a rational foundation, i.e., to become anchored in a real relationship. Now what could be closer to hand than to project, and to project upon that person who brought about the whole conflict through his insistence on the disagreeable basic rule?
Reich’s (1972, p. 35) holistic perspective (like that deployed by Feldenkrais) is apparent in his requirement that the resistance (and underlying neurosis) be addressed from all sides:
Using the cardinal resistance as a kind of citadel, as it were, the analyst must undermine the neurosis from all sides, instead of taking up individual peripheral resistances, i.e., attacking many different points which have only an indirect relation to one another. By consistently broaching the resistances and the analytic material from the first transference resistance, the analyst is able to survey the situation as a whole, both past and present.
Thus, we find that interpretation of the resistance serves as a gateway to an engagement with the underlying neurotic symptoms. In keeping with our analogy, as I have already mentioned, the Tin Man’s armor must first be oiled before there is an attempt to heal the heart. Reich (1972, p. 41) sums it up this way: “resistances cannot be taken up soon enough in the analysis, and that, apart from the resistances, the interpretation of the unconscious cannot be held back enough.” The analyst holds back the interpretation until the resistance (armor) has been oiled—then the Tin Man (and patient) is ready for the more intimate exploration of his heart (neurotic symptoms).
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