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.
