...We correlate this conceptualization to current attachment theory and affect regulation theory principles; we apply this conceptualization earlier in life than others have suggested, to the prenatal and pre-existence realms, as well as later in life to include the dying process; and we indicate some practical applications of this conceptualization in psychotherapy.

We conceptualize resistance to life as an imbalance between Eros (libido energy of attraction and openness to life and growth) and Thanatos (mortido energy of withdrawal, disintegration, and resistance to life and growth).

Three primary defensive strategies exist to resist life rather than fully embrace it:

(1) avoidance, the dismissing strategy of compulsive self-reliance, denial and inhibition to deal with one's source of anxiety, i.e., fear of loss of connection or abandonment. In avoidance, one sidesteps life through denial of the libido and mortido drives. The opposite of avoidance is intrusive over-involvement. The synthesis of the two is "unboundaried radical connectedness."

(2) ambivalence, the strategy of creating distractions to re-direct one's attention away from the source of anxiety, i.e., fear of annihilation or engulfment (loss of self). When there is impasse in the struggle between libido and mortido, when neither gains advantage, then movement ceases and paralysis sets in: stalemate. In stalemate, the battle rages on, usurping all available energy. The opposite of ambivalence is rigid intolerance for ambiguity, nuance or paradox. The synthesis of the two is "passionate commitment in the face of ambiguity."

(3) control, the strategy of regulating internal distress, i.e., the loss of order or the chaos of abandonment, by controlling the perceived source in the outside world in defiance of libido and mortido energies. He desperately seeks physical closeness while trying to create mental distance. The frustration inherent in attempting to both obtain comfort and avoid vulnerability, leads to high levels of stress. The opposite of control is abdication. The synthesis of the two is "ego resiliency."

Resistance

Resistance is a universal reality among humans. We are all resistant to some things, at some times. For some people it is actually the predominant theme in their life. Whether it is a major or minor factor for a given individual, understanding and releasing resistance can create ease and efficiency where struggle and impediment exist.

In psychotherapy clients, we often encounter a level of resistance that seems to be deeper and more pervasive than can be explained by the immediate obstacle they are interacting with. Resistance can be seen as a reaction to that immediate obstacle: not wanting to comply with the boss' demands, or reluctance to face a negative aspect of one's own behavior, or defending against unwanted experience by succumbing to a compulsive urge. For some individuals, however, these behaviors are a re-enactment, or repetition compulsion, of a long-standing pattern of resistance, an existential resistance to life (Hartman & Zimberoff, 2003), to being incarnate on earth, the deep sense of "I don't want to be here." This may be a suicidal condition, conscious or unconscious, overt or covert, or it may be a lack of commitment to life, an unwillingness to embrace life.

One way to observe and understand resistance is through the concepts of primary and secondary gain. The primary gain of a neurotic behavior is that intrapsychic conflict and tension are reduced through the use of a defense mechanism, such as repression, regression, denial, or rationalization (Kaplan & Sadock, 1991). Those defense mechanisms can also take the form of physical symptoms, such as somataform disorders or hypochondria. One example of defense is resistance. The primary gain of resistance to life is reducing the fear of failure and/or success, of death anxiety or the fear of annihilation, of despair and separation anxiety, of the fear of intimacy or engulfment and the deep longing for connection underlying either one.

Secondary gain occurs when the individual has used the defense, and discovers an additional "benefit," such as receiving attention or avoiding responsibility. The secondary gain of using resistance (and the resulting hardships and isolation) can be to avoid challenge, intimacy or connection. It can be having one's expectation that "life is always a struggle" reinforced one more time, justifying feeling stuck or claustrophobic in relationships.

We might generalize three secondary gains from resistance: nurturance, withdrawal, and punishment. In the nurturance theme, secondary gain occurs when individuals receive attention and nurturing from others (or from themselves) by suffering, with the belief that they can only receive it when they suffer. This individual gains special attention and even encouragement by being resistant. The resistant person may gain a sense of power or control through the (neurotic) behaviors. A conflict develops wherein the individual feels that to forgo the resistant behavior will result in losing the special attention or power. The threat of such a loss creates resistance to letting go of the resistant behavior, a self-reinforcing cycle of intransigence.

A second theme of resistance is the secondary gain of withdrawal. These individuals' suffering, which is a consequence of their resistance, becomes the very justification needed for withdrawing from and avoiding the world. This choice protects them from accountability for the pain of loss, or disappointing setbacks in their life. The individual who makes behavioral choices of resistance experiences the primary gain of numbness, avoidance, disconnection and dissociation. This person's secondary gains are having "good reasons" for withdrawing from meeting life head on, and justification for their deep, basic lack of trust.

A third theme of resistance is punishment. Resistance to life may arise when the individual feels that suffering is deserved, that he/she is being punished for being bad or doing wrong. This resistant individual is creating the secondary gain of attracting punishment for any self-judged shortcomings. He/she labels the experience (e.g., on the job, in relationships, with authorities) as punishing, then justifies the behavior of avoiding, denying, or resisting it.

Schoen (1993) discusses these themes in relation to resistance to health, and has found that hypnosis is a valuable tool in uncovering such resistance and in resolving it.

In this article, we survey three specific forms that resistance to life may take: ambivalence, avoidance and control. We correlate this conceptualization to current attachment theory and affect regulation theory principles; we apply this conceptualization earlier in life than others have suggested, to the prenatal and pre-existence realms, as well as later in life to include the dying process; and we indicate some practical applications of this conceptualization in psychotherapy and specifically hypnotherapy.

Engaged passionate commitment to life

What is a healthy life? What are the qualities of life that we might agree would be present were it not for the obstacles of dysfunction and pathology? We offer here some possible answers to those questions without presuming to offer the answers. In the field of psychology generally, considering these concerns is a fairly recent development. Freud considered a life free of psychopathology to be, at best, mundane. Others dared to dream more boldly of possibilities for a life of meaning, fulfillment and happiness. For example, Abraham Maslow devoted his attention to how people develop peak experiences into a consistent life of plateau experience (Krippner, 1972). Maslow (1968, pp. 71-72) said, "What we call normality in psychology is really a psychopathology of the average, so undramatic and so widely spread that we don't even notice it." He referred to peak experiences (Maslow, 1968, 1971) as incorporating altruistic love and will, humanitarian action, artistic and scientific inspiration, philosophic and spiritual insight, and the drive toward purpose and meaning in life.

A recent president of the American Psychological Association, Martin Seligman, initiated the First Annual Positive Psychology Summit in 1999 with the theme "Measuring the Wellsprings of a Positive Life." He has challenged the field of American psychology and mental health to shift the focus from what is wrong with humans to what is right, to enhancing what's good in life in addition to fixing what's wrong, from a disease model to a model of flourishing. Positive Psychology topics range from human virtues such as generosity, perseverance, responsibility, and strength, to the importance of sensual pleasures, to the evolutionary function of positive emotion, including the capacity to love and be loved, altruism, spirituality, creativity, courage and wisdom.

A psychology of flourishing implies that one ascribes meaning to his/her experience. Battista and Almond (1973) applied a meta-analysis of various approaches to the development of meaning in life (Bugental, 1965; Frankl, 1955, 1963; and Maslow, 1968, 1971). They argue that existing theories agree on four major points (Debats, 1999, p. 33): "When individuals state that their lives are meaningful, this implies that (a) they are positively committed to some concept of the meaning of life, (b) this concept provides them with some framework or goal from which to view their lives, (c) they perceive their lives as related to or fulfilling this concept, and (d) they experience this fulfillment as a feeling of significance."

For example, Wrzesniewski (Kogan, 2001) examined how people make meaning of their work. Some people see what they do for a living as just a job, others view it as a career and the rest think of it as a calling. Her research found that people who saw their job as a calling (one-third of the respondents) worked more hours, missed less work and reported higher life satisfaction than others doing similar work. Research subjects were all administrative assistants working in the same organization, raising the question, "How can people doing the same work, sitting next to each other in the same organization, think so differently about their jobs?" Those who saw their job as a calling, talked about it in glowing terms, liked what they did and described it as needing a lot of skill. Those who saw their job as just a job, on their other hand, saw their work as being simple and involving no skills. People can actively shape the meaning of their life experience.

We offer the following five principles to be our understanding of the components of living life fully, an existential approach in which meaning and purpose has been actively and positively shaped. When we resist life, these are the experiences we resist. Our proposed five principles are (Hartman & Zimberoff, 2003):

1. Meaning in life is found in the living of each moment.

2. Passionate commitment to a way of life, to one's purpose and one's relationships, is the highest form of expression of one's humanity.

3. All human beings have freedom of choice and responsibility for our choices.

4. Openness to experience allows for the greatest possible expansion of personal expression.

5. In the ever-present face of death itself, we find the deepest commitment to life itself.

People don't start out, of course, to resist spontaneity, intimacy, adventure, passion, and exhilaration. The defenses that people construct to fend off unwanted experience in childhood are initially useful, healthy and functional. Over time, when the defenses continue to be used even when choices are expanded and new resources are available, the experience being fended off has changed unconsciously. For example, a woman who at age eight was punished for getting any grade in school less than perfect A's developed the behavior of working tirelessly, and sacrificing play, in order to achieve grades that would not be punished. She finds herself, at age fifty, so obsessed with achieving perfection that she is missing out on living her life. What started as a reasonable "bargain with the devil," the "lesser of evils," has turned out to be an unnecessary "bargain with the devil." Her choices as an adult have expanded far beyond those available to her at age eight. The only punishment that threatens her now for imperfection is her own self-judgment, which is not really even her own but rather an introjected tyrant.

We construct defenses early in life to avoid the experience of failure, and find many years later that we are using those same defenses to avoid success. The defenses constructed to protect us from abuse become obstacles to true intimacy. The defenses of protection rigidify into walls of imprisonment, resistance to life ("I don't want to be here" or "I don't want to do this anymore"). Following are some symptoms of resistance to life.

[check] an unconscious death urge, or death anxiety

[check] fear of annihilation ("Don't be me" or, more simply, "Don't be")

[check] despair and separation anxiety

[check] longing for connection (allowing fear of intimacy or engulfment to inhibit risk-taking)

[check] struggle with hardships

[check] feeling stuck or claustrophobic

[check] fear of needs not being met (money, time, safety, material things)

[check] terror of abandonment (perceived abandonment or abandoning others through isolation)

[check] a deep, basic lack of trust

[check] numbness, avoidance, disconnection and dissociation

[check] the nagging question of "Why am I here?" or "Why am I in this [relationship, predicament, family, job, et cetera]?"

Now let us study the multitude of ways in which people fail to engage life with commitment. Rugala and Waldo (1998, p. 67) succinctly state the simple underlying principle: "the extent to which people are experiencing is the extent to which they are being fully alive. When people fail to experience, by denying awareness or avoiding opportunities, they waste their potential." We use the term existential embrace of life for being fully alive, and existential resistance to life for any self-sabotage that denies and thwarts that potential.

Openness to life vs. resistance to life (libido vs. mortido)

Resistance implies struggle between two competing forces. Those two conflicted forces may exist within an individual, created by an internal split: one part wants intimacy, another part fears it and sabotages attempts to have it. To heal the split and resolve the conflict, we facilitate a person to get in touch with his or her real self, which incorporates both forces, or ego states, within himself. The individual remains locked in resistance until he experiences them both, owns them both, and indeed embraces the totality of himself with compassionate self-acceptance. This is what Victor Frankl called the "paradoxical intention," to release dysfunctional aspects of oneself by first fully accepting them.

Perhaps the ultimate conflicted split within any individual is between life and death. We all have, to varying degrees, three primary urges: for pleasure, for existence and for non-existence. Freud's (1922) concept of drives, published in Beyond the Pleasure Principle when he was sixty-three years old, includes the sexual drive (Eros, or libido), the self-preservative drive (the reality principle), and the death drive (Thanatos, or mortido). The libido drive is toward satisfaction, passion, life. The self-preservative drive is toward security, absolutes, certainties, the known and knowable. The mortido drive is toward oblivion, dreamless sleep, death. These drives in Buddhist terms are the thirst for pleasure, the thirst for existence, and the thirst for non-existence. These same three drives have been symbolized as Eros, Chronos and Thanatos, personages whose influence in life and in the world is never-ceasing: love, giving life semblance; experienced time, presiding over life's flow; and death, suppressing life (Logre, 1952).

Otto Rank (1978) postulated that people universally suffer from two primary fears. The first is fear of life, the deeply embedded separation anxiety resulting from the original sense of separation from the greater whole, the oceanic union. This fear leads to a sense of disconnection, isolation, alienation; and to the defense of creating an autonomous and self-sufficient self-image. The other primary fear is the fear of death (union or annihilation), the fear of the loss of that individuality which a person has identified with so completely. It may be the fear that God is dead or never was, that life has no purpose, death no meaning, and existence no transcendent hope (Bascom, 1984). "Between these two fear possibilities, these poles of fear, the individual is thrown back and forth all his life" (Rank, 1978, p. 124).

Federn (1952) offered elaboration of Freud's (1922) concepts of Eros and libido energy, and of Thanatos and mortido energy. Federn considered them to be two different directions of movement that cathexis energy can take. One is an energy of attraction and openness to life and growth: libido. It is integrative and tends to bind elements together into more complex entities. The other is an energy of withdrawal, disintegration, and resistance to life and growth: mortido. It is disintegrative and tends to separate complex entities into simpler elements. Ego-libido is experienced as pleasantly familiar, while ego-mortido is experienced as pain and a fearful unknown.

The governing principle of the ego, the reality principle, is a concession to Thanatos, on the one hand, and a strategic retreat from the libidinal pleasure principle, on the other. The function of the mother in early infancy is to serve as a buffer between Thanatos and Eros, to allow the latter to maintain its sway (Staff, 1953). We shall see that failure of caregivers to provide that buffer results in imbalance. When the mortido energies rival the libidinal energies, the eternal battle between Eros and Thanatos tilts in favor of depression, repression and ambivalent participation.

The significance of libido and mortido energies in the context of resistance to life vs. embrace of life was described eloquently by Soren Kierkegaard (1970), who viewed existence as a conversation between life and death, observing that the most frequent human reaction to the inevitability of death is dread, or angst. One's reaction is often to flee the dreaded reality by creating an inauthentic life with self-sabotaging neurotic anxiety, defenses, resistance, repression, addictions, distractions and dissociation. The solution according to Kierkegaard is engaged passionate commitment, crucial for authentic selfhood. The existentialists following Kierkegaard argue that death structures time as finitude: it is as an ever-present limiting horizon of all possibilities without which any understanding of time evaporates into meaninglessness, and so does the experience of human meaning (Welman, 2000).

The lifelong dance between these two competing forces of mortido energies and libidinal energies provides the context for many of life's choices: struggle, accommodation, truce, denial, defiance, or synthesis. Positive resolution is possible: wisdom, Erik Erikson (1979, p. 60) suggests, is "the detached and yet active concern with life itself in the face of death itself." Lack of resolution is all too possible: remaining captive to the fear of death and the fear of life, stuck "betwixt and between," too fearful of death to give in to the urge to disintegration and non-existence, and too fearful of life to give in to the urge to integration and passionate existence.

Consequences of that intricate dance include these intersections:

1. Passion is a truce between Eros and Thanatos. Freud wrote that passion is the overflowing of the ego-libido over the object. The earliest bond, i.e., mother/child, is experienced by the child as absolutely necessary, unique and irreplaceable, and is, therefore, experienced passionately. Passion is a truce between Eros and Thanatos: possessive, transgressive, and addictive (Alvarez & Guraieb, 1997).

The death instinct is, in truth, the fulfillment of mortido. That is, they who fear not to die have the courage to live (Galdston, 1955). Thanatos can be manifested as growth by altruism, as investment in others. When we accept the presence of both aspects of ourselves, both drives, then they arrive at a truce in the battle. We are no longer pulled apart, one from the other, but rather activated by both. In the words of Erik Erikson, "healthy children will not fear life if their elders have integrity enough not to fear death" (1950, p. 269).

2. Hope is a mitigating agent in the often hostile conflict between libido and mortido. Each needs the other for definition; each provides the background to create the gestalt figure of the other. What would disintegration mean were it not for its opposite? What value would life have without the boundary of inevitable death? The conflict is protracted and exhausting without the intervention of hope, in the form of personal motivation, a projection of the present into the future, a bridge between reality and magic, or a means of ameliorating the hardships of life. The resolution of this conflict leads the individual either to real life (a truce) or real death (a capitulation to Thanatos).

3. Creativity results from the tension between libido and mortido. That tension provides the energy for artistic, esthetic, and material creation. Jung realized that allowing the power of the self to integrate opposites leads to an experience of psychic creativity. We are no longer pulled apart by them, but rather draw on the powerful energies of both to shed light on that which cannot be reduced to rationality.

4. The origin of shame lies in ascendance of destructive forms of Thanatos. When in the early childhood struggle between Eros and Thanatos, the destructive forms of Thanatos take over, shame imprisons the child. Manifestations of that shame are hiding and withdrawal, and in the extreme, paralysis (Ikonen & Rechardt, 1993).

5. Aggression is an attempt to resolve the conflict between libido and mortido by force. In the continual conflict between Eros and Thanatos, aggression is any act leading to tension decrease (the drive is toward oblivion, dreamless sleep, death) and libido is any act that builds a greater tension (drive is toward satisfaction, passion, life) (Sternbach, 1975).

6. Intrapsychic conflict among different parts of the personality provide the battleground between libido and mortido. The struggle between various ego states for executive position can best be explained through concepts of libido and mortido (Igra, 1989).

7. Repressed memories belie a quest for oblivion. Ignorance of one's past can have tragic consequences by barring a person's access to his/her temporal dimension. Without a clear sense of contiguous autobiographical memory, the quest for oblivion, for decathexis, and for dreamless sleep tends toward psychic death and libidinal inertia (Enriquez, 1988).

8. Ambivalence is stalemate between libido and mortido. When there is impasse in the struggle between the two, when neither gains advantage, then movement...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



Looking for additional articles?
Search our database of over 3 million articles.

Looking for more in-depth information on this industry?
Search our complete database of Industry & Market reports by text, subject, publication name or publication date.

About Goliath
Whether you're looking for sales prospects, competitive information, company analysis or best practices in managing your organization, Goliath can help you meet your business needs.

Our extensive business information databases empower business professionals with both the breadth and depth of credible, authoritative information they need to support their business goals. Whether it be strategic planning, sales prospecting, company research or defining management best practices - Goliath is your leading source for accurate information.