Freud, “Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through” (1914) (VII)
Freud compresses a full third of the subject-matter promised by the essay’s title into its final two paragraphs. As though acknowledging this disproportion between his treatments of “remembering,” “repeating,” and “working through,” Freud writes: "I might break off at this point but for the title of this paper, which obliges me to discuss a further point in analytic technique” (155). Just over a page remains, and it is unclear whether he discharges this “obligation” so quickly because (a) there are no extensive clarifications to make regarding “working through” (compared, that is, to the novels figure of “repetition” as a form of “remembering”); or (b) it so exceeds the scope of the paper that it is best left for a separate exposition. I am prepared to accept either explanation.
Whatever his motivations, Freud’s few comments on working-through are rather narrowly related to a misconception among young analysts that leads them to unwarranted discouragement. I will take up these comments in a moment. Before doing so, however, I want to fill in some of the context for grasping them, both in this essay and beyond it.
Analysis, we will recall, had by its “third” phase become essentially resistance analysis. While the final “goal” remained undoing repressions and recovering (or “repairing”) memory, the path to this goal now led, not through hypnosis (phase one), or the direct interpretation of the repressed materials (phase two), but rather through the very obstacles blocking that path, namely, the resistances. The premise of this phase, it appears, is that any viable approach to these repressed materials — at least any approach that does the patient enduring good — must address the resistance holding the repressions in place.
Now, the forms assumed by resistance are potentially manifold. As we saw earlier, anything that interferes with the treatment can and should be suspected of serving resistance. In practice, however, Freud is preoccupied with two particular manifestations of resistance — transference and repetition — which frequently enough coincide.
Here we might remind ourselves of something regarding Freud’s use of this concept — in light, especially, of its “post-history.” For in analytic and non-analytic thinking after Freud, the object of “resistance” has been expanded to embrace — to take several prominent examples — the patient’s reluctance to
accept the analyst’s conjectures or ambitions for the treatment; or
become emotionally attached to the analyst; or even to
change in the direction of improved mental health
Arguably these conceptual developments are implicitly contained in Freud’s writings, even here. Nonetheless, we ought to keep in mind that, as Freud employs the term (in this piece and elsewhere), “resistance” pertains quite narrowly to a specific object: the patient’s compliance or non-compliance with the activity of free association. The patient evinces no resistance, strictly speaking, so long as he or she obeys the injunction to say whatever comes to mind, without exception. Even a transference that is immediately exhibited in treatment does not qualify as “resistance” until it impedes this obedience. (Presumably the same applies to any other “repetitions” in treatment that do not interfere with or divert from this rule.) Conversely, any piece of behavior that does violate this fundamental rule is interpretable, by definition, as resistance.
Let us return now to Freud’s concluding comments. These relate, again, to a misconception, and a resulting discouragement, among inexperienced analysts:
“The first step in overcoming the resistances is made, as we know, by the analyst's uncovering the resistance, which is never recognized by the patient, and acquainting him with it. Now it seems that beginners in analytic practice are inclined to look on this introductory step as constituting the whole of their work.” (155)
On the basis of this mistaken expectation, analysts “complain” that they have “pointed out his resistance to the patient and that nevertheless no change had set in” — that, “indeed, resistance had become all the stronger” (155). As Freud emphasizes, though, “identification” of the resistances is merely an “introductory step,” and in fact “giving the resistance a name could not result in its immediate cessation” (155). Simply alerting a patient to a resistance will not dissolve it. One may say to a patient, for example: “Your intense ‘transference’ feelings are unconscious forms of ‘resisting’ the fundamental rule.” But one must not expect those feelings to then dissolve at a stroke. On the contrary, one may expect that resistance “to become all the stronger.” This is the context in which Freud introduces the third and final concept in the essay’s title:
“One must allow the patient time to become more conversant with this resistance with which he has now become acquainted, to work through it, to overcome it, by continuing, in defiance of it, the analytic work according to the fundamental rule of analysis.” (155)
We have seen that all elements that conspire to stanch the patient’s free associative flow, that prevent him or her from saying everything that comes to mind, should fall under suspicion of “resistance” — preeminently transference and repetition. Freud now tells us that “working through” this resistance finally consists in the patient “continuing, in defiance of it, the analytic work according to the fundamental rule of analysis.”
We will note how suggestive this language of “defiance” is, since in many cases it is a perfect synonym for its present “object.” To defy something is precisely to resist it. Hence we may paraphrase Freud’s position in the following way: “working-through” centrally involves resisting resistance. By adhering to the fundamental rule, the patient (consciously) “resists” all the (unconscious) obstacles to that rule, viz. the “resistances.”