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.