Resistance as an Electrical Metaphor
The hackles that are raised by certain persons if the word psychoanalysis—or heaven forbid, Freud—is mentioned without warning in a public setting is a testimony to what is perhaps the greatest of all resistances: the resistance to the unconscious itself—that is the certainty of the ego (whether religious or scientific) threatened by the occult forces of its own systematic undoing. Whereas defense is static, like a castle (or bunker), resistance is a transitory phenomena, a direct response to the flow of current sparking from the active nature of what had been repressed. One can imagine this sceptic’s hair standing up, as if they were being electrocuted, in a physiological rejection of what is, in fact, the alien nature of their own psyche, but that they find located outside in the real world as the pseudo-science, or even better, the cult of psychoanalysis.
It will be argued right now in this essay, that psychoanalysis is not a cult precisely because of its natural respect for the patient’s resistances. Your success as a patient is not predicated upon whether you believe in anything, least of all psychoanalysis. Obviously you have to attend the hour and talk, but the motives for why you do so are yours alone. No one, and by that I mean not one person, is going to force you to look into your own abyss. And why should you? The abyss has its own dharma. Whether or not you believe in your own personal abyss—or dharma for that matter—is besides the point (I don’t know that I believe in the abyss either; it’s an antiquated metaphor). The patient’s resistance, like dharma, is the pathway to an ultimate truth—that remains unknown to psychoanalysis—that can only be known by the patient in the act of overhearing themselves speak. It is up to the patient whether they wish to discover this truth or not.
Had you overcome the greater resistance to psycho-analysis and now shown up in the consulting room, the next and narrower amount of resistance is against the flow of speech—a flow of speech that can bear its own electrical charge. The topics of discussion, sex, dreams, childhood, current emotional life, or the analysis itself, have the weird power of generating what may as well be a kind of ambient electricity that is dangerous, if not downright fatal, to the ego itself and so if you show up late to analysis, or remain silent or talk only about baseball, or your cat, you are demonstrating as much current as you possess at the time. The analyst is nothing if not patient.
The contact function, as described by modern analysis, can be used as an attempt to read the level of resistance in the patient just as—to continue our electrical metaphor—an ohms reader is used to read electrical resistance in wiring networks. The first contact then, the initial meeting between analyst and analysand, as is well known, bears a great deal of both resistance and electrical current, and that some analysts will find to be isometric to the entirety of the analysis. One might say that resistance has a structure and that the negative of this structure reveals electrical current; and by electrical current we mean the unconscious.
