On the betrayal of a desire – Adam Phillips in LRB:

“To resist something or someone is to try to ensure that some outcome won’t happen; and the resistance implies that – consciously or unconsciously – you know both what you are resisting and what will happen if you don’t resist. And perhaps, above all, as the above quotation from Winnicott suggests, you are protecting your sense of yourself (sometimes the point and sometimes the problem; the patient in psychoanalysis uses his resistances to over-protect himself, and in that sense, resistance can be a protection racket).”

(…)

“Resistance, as Derrida argues in Resistances of Psychoanalysis, is a romance and a project. ‘This word,’ he writes, which resonated in my desire and my imagination as the most beautiful word in the politics and history of this country, this word loaded with all the pathos of my nostalgia, as if, at any cost, I would like not to have missed blowing up trains, tanks and headquarters between 1940 and 1945 – why and how did it come to attract, like a magnet, so many other meanings, virtues, semantic or disseminal chances?”

(…)

“Psychoanalysis begins when conversation breaks down, where the conversation becomes impossible, where there is a reluctance to go on speaking, a pause, a hesitation, a wilful changing of the subject. We are full of sentences, and phrases, and words that we dare not speak, even to ourselves. And as with all strong censorship, it never occurs to us that we are being censored. Successful censorship is never experienced as censorship; it seems part of us. In the psychoanalytic story, all resistance is originally or eventually resistance to speaking, resistance to language. And this is of course our testament to the power of language, and to the power of resistance.”

(…)

“(it is a minor but not insignificant detail that orthodox Freudian analysts would not put blankets on their patients; they would resist, for want of a better word, ordinary straightforward acts of kindness in the service of supposedly higher psychoanalytic aims).”

(…)

“It is as though ordinary life is a performance art in front of, initially, one’s parents and then anyone else who might be interested in one’s wants and needs, in one’s preoccupations. So the resistance is initially in the audience; once Ghent notices what his patient needs and acts on it, she can too. This is a version, in quite different language, of Lacan’s remark that the resistance is always in the analyst.”

(…)

“We resist – at its most extreme in the part of ourselves that Freud enigmatically called the death instinct – the wish to survive and flourish and be gratified. That resistance, in the vocabulary of psychoanalysis, can be the resistance to being alive, the resistance to our aliveness, which is also a resistance to our dependence on one another. The by now familiar diagnostic psychoanalytic categories – hysteria, obsessionality, depression, anxiety, anorexia, phobias – are all forms of self-obsession that are fundamentally self-depriving, self-starving ways of living (which is why, by the same token, psychoanalysis should free us of our interest in ourselves). They are not in the service of what Nietzsche called ‘more life’.”

(…)

“If one word for resistance in psychoanalysis is defence, the other word for resistance in psychoanalysis is pleasure. And just as, of course, there are many so-called ‘mechanisms of defence’ in psychoanalytic theory, there are many kinds of pleasure; not least, of course, the pleasure of having no pleasure, the pleasure involved in attacking one’s pleasures. The pleasure, in short, of resisting or even triumphing over one’s pleasures: pleasure as a resistance to pain, masochism as the psychic trick of making pain pleasurable.”

(…)

“What it seemed to resist was life itself. Resistance is not quite the right word for Freud’s supposed death instinct, which is more of an attacking force, but Freud was simply discovering the limits of psychoanalytic treatment; it would take Ferenczi to reveal just how narrow, limited and limiting, and indeed pessimistic, Freud’s account of resistance really was, almost as though there was a part of Freud that resisted psychoanalysis (and called that resistance the death instinct).”

(…)

“Once there was what the analyst Paul Gray calls the ‘rather slow acknowledgment that resistances themselves, although not part of the repressed, were in fact unconscious’, then psychoanalysis involved not only the making conscious of unconscious desire but also the making conscious of unconscious resistances to this desire.
We have to know what we are resisting, and that we are resisting; and this means being curious rather than anxiously impressionistic about what we are tempted to resist and noticing that resisting is what we are actually doing rather than, say, being ourselves or being very discriminating. And this, of course, is what psychoanalysis is for as a treatment. It says, at its most extreme, that what you call living your life, or being yourself, or doing what you can is in fact living in a state of hyper-vigilant resistance. That, if you accept Freud’s description of the unconscious, then resisting is not something you do occasionally, or in certain recognisable situations, but something you need to do all the time. Freudian men and women live in a state of continuous emergency, always potentially threatened by overwhelming, unpredictable and often unrecognisable, largely unconscious desires.”

(…)

“(Lacan is explicit and insistent that there is no sovereign good, and that such fantasies are no longer viable ways of holding us or keeping us together; Winnicott, although he doesn’t and wouldn’t put it like this, seems to believe that individual development is our sovereign good, if a very ambiguous kind of sovereign good). Resistance is the heart of the matter, at least for Freud and his immediate followers, because human beings, unlike other animals, are essentially resistant to their nature and so attack it.”

(…)

“In Ferenczi’s account, the obstacle becomes the instrument; where Freud became increasingly gloomy and despondent about the power of the patient’s resistances to sabotage and discredit psychoanalysis, Ferenczi – far less sceptical than Freud about psychoanalytic ‘technique’ – insisted that it was precisely the patient’s resistances, and the way the analyst approached them, that both facilitated and confirmed the efficacy of psychoanalysis. It was because the patient was allowed and encouraged to resist the treatment that the treatment worked. As if to say, the patient needs to acknowledge and articulate all his suspicions, misgivings, doubts, criticisms, prejudices and loathings – his hatred in other words – of the analyst and of analysis before he can arrive at his appreciation of the treatment.”

(…)

“We need to notice that many of the best things in our lives, about our lives, begin as resistances. Our interest may require what Winnicott calls a ‘period of hesitation’. Because we resist when something is at stake; we resist when something matters to us, even if we don’t always know what it is. We resist when there is the apprehension of excessive pleasure or excessive suffering, or both. But resistance, as Ferenczi intimates, is apprehension and prediction. The patient can only begin psychoanalytic treatment by resisting it: resisting it and trying to find out to what or whom he is entrusting himself.”

(…)

“Of course, resistance always runs the risk of degenerating into stubbornness, or arrogance, or revenge, or grudge or dismissal. But as long as it initiates a process – the process Ferenczi so vividly outlines – rather than pre-empting it, psychoanalysis can show us how and why resistance is the one thing we should not resist.”

Read the article here.

All resistance is resistance to language.

Resistance is resistance to aliveness, in my words, to the overwhelming suspicion that it is bad to be alive.

Bot also, cure is not possible without resistance to the cure.

How not to betray your own desire? That’s the question.