Resistance is a human process that happens always that the person is under menace or is in position of defending his right to be self-regulated. Resistance is not, by nature, a given psychotherapeutic process. It occurs in psychotherapy, not as an opposition process against himself or to the therapist, but as a function of helping a new situation inside the person. Resistance is, by nature, the actualization of the instinct of self-preservation. That is, everything that is born deserves to live, everything that emerges from the organism emerges as a necessity of the organism, that always follows of the preference law, no matter the nature of the object under observation. Resistance is a contact form that cannot be destroyed, but managed, controlled, because it emerges as a defense of the totality in action. Resistance is, sometime, resistance to awareness, not to contact, even if resistance is a contact form. We don't use to work with the resistance, as resistance, indeed, because if the body does not resist, it dies. We work rather the process than with the resistance in itself. The therapist also resists, it is, and even he also experiences his own self-regulation. What is generally called resistance, we call organic self-regulation process, and we work with mine of these mechanisms.
resistance; existential phenomenology; gestalt therapy; group process