Abstract
Does psychoanalysis matter politically? Further to Freud’s own involvement in the institutional politics of the psychoanalytic movement, the relationship between psychoanalysis and politics has been addressed on any number of occasions. In this chapter, I shall focus particularly on the Freudian interpretation of resistance as a critical and political resource. For Freud, the ‘whole theory of psycho-analysis is . . . in fact built up on the perception of the resistance offered to us by the patient when we attempt tomake his unconscious conscious to him’ (1933: 68). But does the treatment of the patient’s internal resistances (innere Widerstände) exhaust the critical reach of the Freudian concept of resistance? I don’t think this is necessarily the case. I will argue in fact that the political significance of psychoanalysis rests on the historical as well as the personal meaning of resistance.
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Groarke, S. (2015). Psychoanalysis and the Event of Resistance. In: Loewenthal, D. (eds) Critical Psychotherapy, Psychoanalysis and Counselling. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137460585_13
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137460585_13
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