Resistance - Annual Theme 2026
Introduction by Monika Pessler
Every year the Sigmund Freud Museum choses a new focus, a central theme that guides its program: “Speaking freely” determines the way we work at the museum in two respects. On the one hand, when developing activities that are relevant to the museum, we aim to encourage respectful dialogue and an openness to different points of view. On the other hand, it is about analyzing psychoanalytical findings in terms of their pertinence to contemporary issues in society and culture.
Resistance
Resistance is key and core to Freud’s thinking. As it shifts and develops through time, the concept also collects ambiguities. Beginning with the early hysterics, where it manifests itself as a resistance to hypnosis and a resistance to voicing repressed memories, it becomes the patient’s very resistance to the authority of the analyst and the process of analysis itself – not to mention the public’s resistance to psychoanalysis and the “blow” it inflicts on the authority of reason. Then, too, resistance emerges as one of the ego’s defensive armaments. Finally, it appears as the resistance of the unconscious itself.
No sooner do I write this last, than I think of my children and now grandchildren, their (unconscious) resistance as babies and toddlers and adolescents – might we call it “automatic” resistance – to parental will and wishes.
This embeddedness of human resistance gives me hope, particularly in these times when authorities take themselves more seriously than is their due and egregious abuses of political, economic and digital power are everywhere.
Our hope lies in human resistance.
Lisa Appignanesi OBE is a prize-winning writer, novelist, and cultural commentator. She was President of English PEN, Chair of the Freud Museum London, and until 2020 Chair of the Royal Society of Literature of which she is now a vice-president. She is a Visiting Professor at King’s College London and in 2024-25 guest curated “Women & Freud: Patients, Pioneers, Artists” at the Freud Museum London, as well as editing a catalogue for the exhibition. Her non-fiction books include Everyday Madness: On Grief, Anger, Loss and Love (2018), Trials of Passion: Crimes in the Name of Love and Madness (2014), All About Love: Anatomy of an Unruly Emotion (2011), the prize-winning Mad Bad and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors from 1800 (2008); Freud’s Women (1992/2005, with John Forrester); a biographical portrait of Simone de Beauvoir (2005), amongst others. She is also the author of an acclaimed family memoir, Losing the Dead (1999) and nine novels, including The Memory Man (2004, which won a Holocaust Fiction Prize) and Paris Requiem (2001/2014). She has edited many books including John Forrester’s Freud and Psychoanalysis. Her articles have appeared in The Guardian, The Sunday Times and The New York Review of Books.
Oleksandr Filts lives and works in Lviv (Ukraine) and is not able to write a statement at this time due to current demands under conditions of war.
Oleksandr Filts, Prof. Dr., is a psychiatrist and psychoanalytic psychotherapist who heads the Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy at the Faculty of Postgraduate Education of the National Medical University Danylo Halytsky Lviv. He is also a founding member and president of the Ukrainian Umbrella Association for Psychotherapy. In 1994, together with Austrian psychotherapists, he founded a training project for group psychotherapy, which he still directs together with Liudmyla Samsonova. From 2005 to 2007, Professor Filts was President of the European Association of Psychotherapy (EAP). Working with crises, traumatic experiences and their consequences is one of the many focal points of his work. He is the president of the The UNBROKEN University, an innovative educational project created in 2025 in response to the challenges of war.
Resistance
10.11.25 Yes, I will be happy to write a text on resistance, thank you for the invitation.
12.12.25 I am running a bit behind, but will have the text soon.
1.7.26 Happy New Year! I plan to finish the text on resistance in the next week or so.
2.6.26 Apologies, it is the start of term and I’m running late.
2.8.26 I’ll have the text ready by tomorrow.
2.9.26 It has been a hectic week, but I will have the text tonight.
2.12.26 I’m very sorry I missed the publication date: I got swamped.
Rubén Gallo is the Walter S. Carpenter, Jr. Professor in Latin American Literature at Princeton University, where he has taught since 2002. He is the author of many books on Twentieth Century culture, including Mexican Modernity: The Avant-Garde and the Cultural Revolution (2006, MIT Press, winner of the MLA’s Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize), Freud’s Mexico: Into the Wilds of Psychoanalysis (2010, MIT, winner of the Gradiva Prize), Proust’s Latin Americans (2014, Hopkins). He is also a novelist and was published two books on Cuba: Teoría y práctica de la Habana (2017) and Muerte en La Habana (2021). His work has been translated into French, Spanish, Italian, Japanese and Chinese. In 2020 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His new book, Skyscrapers in Havana: Architecture and Literature of the Cuban Revolution, will be published in 2027 by the University of Chicago Press. He is currently working on a new book on Freud and opera.
Resistance
The Farsi translation of resistance is: مقاومت
Moghâvemat
Dr. Gohar Homayounpour is a psychoanalyst and Gradiva Award–winning author. She is a member of the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA), the American Psychoanalytic Association (APsaA), the Italian Psychoanalytical Society (SPI), and the National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis (NAAP). She is a Training and Supervising Analyst of the Freudian Group of Tehran, of which she is also the founder and past president, and a member of the IPA group Geographies of Psychoanalysis. She is an invited international lecturer, actively involved in teaching, supervision, and publishing across a broad range of institutions and universities worldwide. She serves on the editorial board of The Psychoanalytic Quarterly as well as on the editorial board of Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society. She is also the editor-in-chief of the series Psychoanalytic Notebooks, published in Iran by Ghatreh Publishing House. Her first book, Doing Psychoanalysis in Tehran (MIT Press, 2012), won the Gradiva Award and has been translated into several languages. Her most recent book is Persian Blues: Psychoanalysis and Mourning (Routledge, 2022).
Resistance cannot resist Resistance
In his endeavor to distance himself from the treatment of hypnosis, Freud encountered a force which made itself noticeable whenever he attempted to reach a pathogenic idea. In the Studies of Hysteria (1896), Freud writes with great excitement “[…] I had to overcome a resistance. This situation led me at once to the theory that by means of my psychical work I had to overcome a psychical force in the patients which was opposed to the pathogenic ideas becoming conscious (being remembered). A new understanding seemed to open before my eyes when it occurred to me that this must no doubt be the same psychical force [“psychische Kraft”] that had played a part in the generating of the hysterical symptom and had at that time prevented the pathogenic idea from becoming conscious. What kind of force could one suppose was operative here, and what motive could have put it into operation? […] The psychical trace of it was apparently lost to view. Nevertheless that trace must be there. If I endeavored to direct the patient’s attention to it, I became aware, in the form of resistance, of the same force as had shown itself in the form of repulsion when the symptom was generated.“[1]
Having realized that the same psychical force could create a symptom but also oppose it at the same time, enticed Freud to pursue these traces until he had found the kernel of resistance, the repressed incompatible or pathogenic idea, which, once he had located it, gave his patients the freedom to suffer less under their bodily symptoms.
At first, Freud was quite bold and invented the method of putting physical pressure upon his patients’ forehead: “I make use in the first instance of a small technical device. I inform the patient that, a moment later, I shall apply pressure to his forehead, and I assure him that, all the time the pressure lasts, he will see before him a recollection in the form of a picture or will have it in his thoughts in the form of an idea occurring to him; and I pledge him to communicate this picture or idea to me, whatever it may be.“[2] With time however, Freud became less physical and authoritarian and simply invited his patients to reveal all the thoughts that came to their mind, no matter how immoral or frightful they were. The pursuit of resistance as a formidable and often secretive force, remained a life-long quest for Freud. Throughout his work, resistance also assumed different shapes and manifestations, whether it concealed itself in the transference, in enactments or in the negative therapeutic reaction.
What has always intrigued me though, is the fact resistance means and embodies many meanings at the same time: for psychoanalysts, resistance is primarily associated with an obstruction to the analytic process, and for men and women having joined the Resistance in France during World War II, it represents a fight for liberation and a sign of immense courage. How can the word Resistance embroil such contradictory movements? We might find one explanation for this intriguing dilemma in the already cited text by Freud, On Psychotherapy of Hysteria, where he writes, „The patient’s ego had been approached by an idea which proved to be incompatible [“unverträglich”], which provoked on the part of the ego a repelling force [“Kraft der Abstoßung”] of which the purpose was a defence against this incompatible idea. This defence was in fact successful. The idea in question was forced out of consciousness and out of memory. The psychical trace of it was apparently lost to view.“[3]
When one looks at the latest mass demonstrations in Minnesota against Trump’s detestable immigration policies and the arrests of many innocent people and now even the death of two people, or the senseless killing of nearly 20.000 people in Iran who oppose the government, it becomes clear that movements of resistance grow out of a deep and abhorrent sense that a tremendous injustice has taken place to which one can no longer remain a passive and silent witness. One has to stand up and say “NO”, no matter what the consequences are for one’s own life. This devastating force that inhabits resistance, is, as Adam Phillips (2025) writes, “Resistance to tyranny, both internal and external […]. It has gradually come to be seen as the key to survival in an oppressive modern world”.[4] Freud’s radical pursuit of this powerful force of resistance contributed to the possibility that women were eventually freed from the tyranny of their sexual fantasies and anxieties in the 1900’s, leading them to come into view more prominently and to be heard more loudly. 130 years later, women are again at the forefront screaming loudly and fighting for their civil liberties in many religious and right-wing nations, be it in Iran, Afghanistan or even in the streets of Minnesota.
[1] Sigmund Freud, “Psychotherapy of Hysteria”, in: Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud, Studies on Hysteria (1895), Standard Edition 2, pp.253–305, p. 268f. (emphasis in the original).
[2] Ibid, p. 270 (emphasis JWB).
[3] Ibid, p.269 ( emphasis JWB).
[4] Adam Philips (2025), “On Resistance”, in: London Review of Books, Vol. 47, No. 14/15.
Jeanne Wolff Bernstein, Ph.D. is the past president, and supervising and personal analyst at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California (PINC), San Francisco. She is on the faculty at PINC and at the NYU Post-Doctoral Program for Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy and at the Wiener Arbeitskreis für Psychoanalyse, Vienna. She was the 2008 Fulbright-Freud Visiting Scholar of Psychoanalysis at the Sigmund Freud Museum, Vienna. She is a member and vice-president of the Board of the Wiener Arbeitskreis für Psychoanalyse and works now as a psychoanalyst in Vienna. She has published numerous articles on the interfaces between psychoanalysis, the visual arts and film. Her book, The Lure of the Gaze and the Past, Berlin, Alexander Verlag was published in 2025. With Daniela Finzi, she is the co-editor of Thoughts for the Times on Group and Masses (2025) and with Helga Klug and Daniela Kammerer she is the Co-editor of Neu Handeln und Denken (2024).
On Resistance
Resistance is a notion in which the clinical dimension of psychoanalysis converges with the political one. In the economy of psyche resistance works on the side of repression, of repressive culture. Overcoming resistance in the clinical process is aimed at liberation of a subject from unnecessary suffering and cultural pressure, and also at gaining knowledge about the unconscious.
One of the origins of the idea of resistance in psychoanalysis is Freudian pressure technique. This technique consisted in placing a therapeutic palm on the patient’s forehead, then removing it and asking a patient to say whatever comes to her mind. Freud creates pressure in order to then release it, and this process might mean creating imitation of resistance and releasing it. Freud generates external resistance-pressure in order to relieve the patient of internal resistance, to let him see and speak freely. External and internal resistances as if imitating each other.
Under the circumstances of the crash of symbolic matrix in which we find ourselves today it is important not only to overcome clinical resistance, including, as Lacan emphasizes, resistance to analysis on the part of the analyst, but also to resist the system that aims to annihilate the thinking-desiring subject together with knowledge and education. Under these circumstances the most important motto is one by François Tosquelles: to resist and to create. To resist the paranoid system that destroys the human subject and to create meaning in life on the planet.
Victor Mazin, Ph.D., is a practicing psychoanalyst. He is the founder of Freud's Dream Museum in St. Petersburg (1999) and an honorary member of The Museum of Jurassic Technology (Los Angeles). He is the head of the department of theoretical psychoanalysis at the East-European Institute of Psychoanalysis (St. Petersburg), and associate professor at The Department of Liberal Arts and Sciences of St. Petersburg State University, honorary professor of the Institute of Depth Psychology (Kiev). He is also a translator from English and French into Russian, and was editor-in-chief of the Kabinet journal and member of the editorial boards of the journals Psychoanalysis (Kiev), European Journal of Psychoanalysis (Rome), Transmission (Sheffield), Journal for Lacanian Studies (London). He has published numerous articles and books on psychoanalysis, deconstruction, cinema and visual arts.
Streets of Minneapolis
What has been seen and heard about the fascist displays and killings on the streets of Minneapolis in the winter of 2026 is, tragically true. What is unfolding constitutes a collective trauma, both physical and moral. Terror has been inflicted upon nonviolent civilians, not only through lethal force but through the deliberate shattering of shared reality. The people of Minneapolis have responded with spontaneous acts of resistance to what they experience as murderous impunity exercised by federal law enforcement. Their actions represent an effort to preserve both life and meaning, and to protect Somali immigrants and other vulnerable communities from detention or removal without criminal cause by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), both agencies operating under the authority of the Department of Homeland Security.
Citizen-recorded smartphone videos documented the killings of Renée Good and Alex Pretti. These recordings function as acts of witnessing in the psychoanalytic sense: attempts to transform overwhelming experience into perceivable form. The transformation allows psychological processes to be thought, felt, and shared. Yet the almost immediate response of the Trump Administration, issuing false, contradictory, and morally perverse accounts that blamed the victims themselves constituted a second trauma. This maneuver did not merely deny responsibility; it attacked the public’s capacity to know what it knows. The implicit message is “Who are you going to believe, us, your protectors, or your own eyes?”
Such assaults on reality are not episodic but cumulative. They operate as ongoing salvos aimed at overwhelming the American psyche, saturating it with unprocessed emotional hypocrisy and debris. A solipsistic president and his inner circle appear driven by displays of omnipotence, greed, and cruelty, functioning less as leaders than as generators of psychic disorganization. In this sense, authoritarian power does not merely govern bodies; it colonizes inner life.
The concept resistance carries multiple meanings across disciplines. In its most general sense, it signifies opposition to force, intrusion, or domination. In material science, resistance refers to a predictable physical property; in medicine, it describes the body’s capacity to combat infection. In classical psychoanalysis, resistance denotes unconscious processes that interfere with making the unconscious conscious. In contemporary psychoanalysis, resistance is understood as meaningful communication and a way of coping, an expression of the patient’s fears regarding change, safety, and relational rupture. In the political sphere, resistance often takes the form of collective disobedience in response to authoritarian or totalitarian power, serving to preserve moral continuity under conditions of coercion or destruction. In cultural expression, resistance functions as memory-work: a refusal to allow violence, erasure, or lies to pass unmarked. Art becomes a container when institutional containers fail. It may take the form of a film, painting, play, poem, symphony, or song.
History offers sobering illustrations of this psychic-political wound. On November 4, 1956, Soviet tanks entered Budapest in overwhelming force, crushing the Hungarian Revolution, extinguishing a democratic uprising at the cost of thousands of lives. The following day, Albert Camus wrote, “There is in this world, running parallel to the forces of death and subjugation, an enormous force of persuasion. It’s called culture.” Camus argued for a measured, ethical rebellion grounded in moral limits. His insistence that 2 + 2 = 4 represents what might be called a moral minimum—the lowest boundary beyond which truth itself collapses. George Orwell gave this idea its starkest literary formulation in 1984, where the annihilation of this simple truth signals the psyche’s final surrender. “If this goes,” Orwell’s character insists, “nothing remains.” Similarly, the playwright and dissident Václav Havel articulated the concept of “living in truth” as the foundation of the Czech people’s resistance, culminating in the Velvet Revolution of 1989. For Havel, resistance often consisted of small, quotidian acts of honesty carried out even when no immediate change seemed possible.
Culture and the arts thus operate as a parallel institution of truth-telling when official discourse is corrupted or weaponized. Artists have borne witness to injustice—directly and obliquely—for centuries. In the American context, figures such as Paul Robeson, Bob Dylan, and Joan Baez exemplify this tradition of artistic resistance. For this writer, however, the Greek composer Mikis Theodorakis stands as an especially compelling example—not only as a creator of sublime melodies but as a moral and cultural force whose work has inspired Greeks, the global Greek diaspora, and countless others who have yearned for personal and political liberation.
For decades, Theodorakis was a tireless voice against cultural and political oppression. Collaborating with poets from across the ideological spectrum, he championed an ethos grounded in freedom, equality, and human dignity. His biographer Gail Holst-Warhaft observes, “As a political figure in modern Greece, Theodorakis embodied the spirit of resistance to the abuse of authority, from the Nazi occupation of his country and the ensuing civil war to the military dictatorship of 1967–1974.” Perhaps most remarkable was his capacity to create music and poetry under conditions of despair—during repeated incarcerations and episodes of brutal torture inflicted for his political beliefs. His life and work testify to the indomitable spirit of the artist confronting political repression. Few doubted his defiant declaration in exile, “Your tanks will rust. Our songs will last.” Indeed, the junta’s tanks now sit in junkyards, while his songs endure as anthems of resistance, mourning, and survival.
On January 28, 2026, the acclaimed rock musician and activist Bruce Springsteen released a striking music video titled “Streets of Minneapolis”. The song remains steadfastly aligned with truth and resistance. It functions simultaneously as witness and mourner. Rather than explaining or rationalizing violence, it helps metabolize overwhelming grief and brutality.
Through its lyrics and imagery, the song names and describes what occurred during that cruel January in Minneapolis. It is difficult to know how long such a work can endure in a climate saturated with terror and disinformation. Yet for many who have encountered this protest music video, it offers a fragile but vital drop of hope and a suggestion that even the darkest winter may not last forever.
Spyros D. Orfanos, PhD, is the former Director (2019-2025) of the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis (NYU Postdoc). From 2004-2018, he was the Clinic Director of NYU Postdoc. A Fellow of the American Psychological Association (APA) and the International Psychoanalytic Association, (IPA) he is past president of the Society of Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychology (SPPP) of the APA, and the International Association of Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy. In 2016, he was co-editor with Elliot Jurist of the special supplement of Psychoanalytic Psychology (APA) on “Psychoanalysis and the Humanities.” In 2017, he founded the NYU Human Rights Work Group. In 2023 he received the SPPS Award for International Activism for Social Justice. In 2025, he curated Why Theodorakis Matters, a centennial scholarly video (long form) archive on Mikis Theodorakis, cultural memory, resistance, and collective mourning.
Resistance
When we hear the word “resistance”, we probably spontaneously think of political resistance first. We think of the resistance by individuals and groups who, based on certain moral and political convictions, speak out against a political regime or societal movement that exhibits strong totalitarian, authoritarian, or dehumanizing traits. Political resistance consists of the rejection of such a regime and the insistence on change.
When Freud talks about resistance, he is referring to something completely different. In Freud's thinking, resistance refers to all psychological forces that oppose change in a given situation, even if that situation is one of psychical and physical suffering. For Freud, this resistance is of crucial importance in clinical practice. After all, where there is resistance, something is being repressed, important memories, thoughts, and feelings are denied access, a facade remains intact, and true motives are concealed. If we were to apply this clinical insight to the realm of politics and society, we could say that Freud is primarily interested in the question of why there is so little political and societal resistance that demands change for the better, and why, on the contrary, there is so much resistance to change and so much insistence on maintaining a given political and social order, even when this order has an evident harmful and destructive impact. It is precisely this unraveling of the motives behind insistence, which is often neglected in concrete political resistance, that renders this resistance less effective. Seen in this light, Freud does—unintentionally—contribute to thinking political and societal resistance.
Herman Westerink is Endowed Professor and Associate Professor for philosophy of religion at the Center for Contemporary European Philosophy, Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands. He did his PhD at the University of Groningen and wrote his professorial dissertation (Habilitation) at the University of Vienna. He has published many books and articles on Freudian psychoanalysis, sexuality, subjectivity and religion. Amongst others he published a monograph on Freud’s theories of the sense of guilt (2009), a monograph on and text editions of the first edition of Freud's Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (2016, 2021, with Philippe Van Haute). Also, he published a monograph on Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality (2019). Recently he published a monograph on Freud’s metaphysics of trauma (2022, with Philippe Van Haute). He is co-editor of the book series “Sigmund Freuds Werke: Wiener Interdisziplinäre Kommentare” (Vienna UP) and of the book series “Figures of the Unconscious” (Leuven University Press). He is member of the International Society for Psychoanalysis and Philosophy (ISPP/SIPP) and its Freud Research Group.
Resistance
Every year the Sigmund Freud Museum choses a new focus, a central theme that guides its program: “Speaking freely” determines the way we work at the museum in two respects. On the one hand, when developing activities that are relevant to the museum, we aim to encourage respectful dialogue and an openness to different points of view. On the other hand, it is about analyzing psychoanalytical findings in terms of their pertinence to contemporary issues in society and culture. The topic for 2026 will be no exception, taking these aspects into account, focusing on current sociopolitical developments, and looking at them through a psychoanalytical lens. At a time when the threats to our fundamental rights seem to be growing and our right to freedom of expression is increasingly becoming a pawn in authoritarian hands, our response to all trends to safeguard or even expand dictatorial systems is: resistance!
Resistance—an important term in psychoanalysis, it refers to a psychological avoidance tactic that opposes the conscious acknowledgement of repressed content—is inevitably ingrained in our work here at the birthplace of psychoanalysis due to its clinical significance. Moreover, the psychoanalytical perspective can give clues as to the function of resistance in society—beyond individual realms of experience. Right now, war and destruction, the cost-of-living crisis, climate change and natural disasters are lending growing substance to the factor of resilience. The subject of numerous psychological studies since the 1950s, resilience is now required of individuals and entire groups more than ever before. The question of the willingness to resist or oppose is raised as a topic of discussion in psychoanalysis, psychology, and sociology. We need only think of the destructive forces that are driving our Western civilizations apart with their threats to minorities, women, and young adults, despite this social order having benefited from decades of peace and economic booms since the end of World War II. In such times even democratic forms of resistance become a rarity: acts of solidarity usually only occur when one’s own life is closely linked to the ruin of others’ and is at immediate risk. The recognition that in a globalized world the devastating impact of threatening states of affairs reverberates around the world and that almost no one can consider themselves safe, is only tentatively entering our collective consciousness.
This reveals the gulf between psychoanalytical resistance and other possible meanings of the term—the former is removed from our consciousness, whereas civil resistance can only be applied to social injustices and discrimination consciously—whether through civic engagement or artistic discourses, creations, and actions. The same applies to political resistance to authoritarian power structures and antidemocratic trends and thus remains a key tool in the fight for human rights and dignity. However, one idea is common to all forms of resistance: it always means a revolt against something that is perceived as threatening and destructive.
For this reason, our advisory board have taken a psychoanalytical, social, and political approach to this topic for 2026, writing critical articles and selecting pictures that you can find here on our website in the online exhibition resistance. For this interesting and fruitful collaboration, I extend my heartfelt thanks to:
Rubén Gallo (Princeton University)
Herman Westerink (Radboud University Nijmegen)
Jeanne Wolff Bernstein (Wiener Arbeitskreis für Psychoanalyse)
Lisa Appignanesi (King’s College London)
Oleksandr Filts (Unbroken University)
Gohar Homayounpour (Freudian Group of Tehran)
Victor Mazin (East-European Institute of Psychoanalysis St. Petersburg)
Spyros D. Orfanos (New York University)
Monika Pessler
Director
Sigmund Freud Museum
