Re:Help - resistance

Hi Brian,

Thanks for answering!
Concerning the difficulties in accurately defining concepts like awareness and contact: I hear you - of course these concepts are broad enough to be open to interpretation. And the same goes with resistance. That is, within the boundaries of the basics of gestalt therapy theory. Exactly what those boundaries and basics are about is also open for discussion, and so on and so forth…. When all this is said, I still have some questions and concerns left.
I once posted a question on a different board about resistance, (thank you all, my posts kept coming back, so I didn't thank you or participate..) and it seemed to start a lively discussion about whether resistance was about awareness at all, or rather about contact. You wrote:

I find the term creative adjustment to be useful one when exploring what meaning I will pour into the word resistance as it notes a process of growth and change which takes part as different aspects of the field come into contact with each other and don't necesarily head in the same direction...[…] Whether or not this process happens in awareness will determine my ability to choose how I am in relation to the other...

Your explanation pinpoints the role of awareness, doesn't it… Resistance is both about awareness and contact, and the way I'm beginning to see it, it cannot adequately be described in terms of either/or. It has to be both. Somehow, this hasn't been explicated (at least not in the books and articles I've managed to get my hands on) in theory.
The awareness perspective on resistance seems to be of psychoanalytic descendance, and the contact perspective seems to root in gestalt psychology, at least in Lewin and Goldsteins expansions.

The central issue seems to be the role of the therapist and the therapeutic relationship, or: how does change come about? Will the therapist do for his client what he cannot himself: bring about awareness, or does change happen according to a "drive towards closure" as in the paradoxical theory of change - "by itself", sort of.
Am I way off here?
Take a look at these two quotations from Gestalt Therapy (1951):

”…A major problem for all forms of psychotherapy is to motivate the patient to do what needs to be done. He must return to “unfinished business” which he left unfinished in the past because it was so painful that he had to flee” (Perls, Hefferline & Goodman, 1951, p. 140).

And in contrast to this:

” It is a basic tendency of the organism to complete any situation or transaction which for it is unfinished […] the figure/ground will form quite without your deliberate intervention.” (Perls et al., 1951, p. 77, min kursivering).

This obviously refers to different therapeutic strategies concerning resistances, but is it also different theoretical conceptualisations of resistance?

Best,
Psych Student.

Replies:

Re:Help - resistance, by Brian ONeill, 05/29/03 Re:Help - resistance, by Psych Student, 06/02/03

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