The Taopsychotherapeutic Perspective on Resistance.

Clients or patients often come to psychotherapy to alleviate psychological symptoms and pain but, paradoxically, soon behave in ways that seem to interfere with the process and progress of therapy. As early as the 1890's Freud began calling this phenomenon resistance and immediately realised that he needed to understand and deal with this matter to achieve therapeutic goals. Our understanding and ways of dealing with resistance in psychotherapy have undergone several developments over the years. Initially, psychoanalysts understood resistance as an obstacle to the therapeutic task and relationship and sought "to remove" it. However, over time, it has been realised that this is impossible, and the resistance also has an important function. In other words, the appearance of resistance was seen as an opportunity to understand the subjective experience of clients and the relational context in which it occurred. Dr. Rhee Dongshick, the founder of Taopsychotherapy, added a wholly fresh perspective in keeping with more recent relational perspectives. He came to see resistance as a therapist-centred concept and that what a therapist feels as resistance is, in fact, the result of the therapist's countertransference, essentially a failure of the therapist's empathy. He fully understood the patient's anxiety about admitting and facing unbearably painful emotions. Therefore, Rhee Dongshick's approach was to "melt" resistances by empathising with the patient's most distressing nuclear feelings with sustained, deeply empathic inquiry. In this paper, the author would like to examine in detail the perspective and therapeutic interventions of Taopsychotherapy in the face of resistance. Hopefully, this will propose meaningful guidelines for the conduct of psychotherapy, comparing these with some other well-known Western approaches to psychotherapy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]