Lighthouse Newsletter: Volume 10   Number 2   June 1999

RESISTANCE

(To Doing The Course)

How One Studies A Course in Miracles Without Really Learning It,

by Gloria Wapnick
and Kenneth Wapnick, Ph.D.

Although the term resistance appears infrequently in A Course in Miracles, it is nonetheless a key concept in the process of students learning the mind-changing lessons of forgiveness that are the Course’s central teaching. Indeed, it is the only concept that can satisfactorily explain a phenomenon experienced by most (if not all) students of the Course at some point or another in their work with it. This is the seeming paradox, on the one hand, of consciously and most sincerely attempting to learn, live, and practice the Course principles under the guidance of Jesus or the Holy Spirit, while on the other hand, experiencing the ongoing frustration of not doing just that. Most spiritual seekers are familiar with the famous words of St. Paul, who exclaimed out of this same sense of frustration: “For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do” (Romans 7:19). This article explores the issue of resistance in Course students’ efforts to put into practice its principles of forgiveness as taught by their Inner Teacher, the Holy Spirit.

As with so many other areas that touch on the process of healing in A Course in Miracles, the work of Sigmund Freud offers us many parallels which underscore the importance of understanding the dynamics of the problem and its solution. Very early in his psychoanalytic work, Freud observed that his patients were not improving, despite the insights he was offering them as to the cause of their neurosis. It eventually dawned on him that the problem lay in the fact that the patients did not want to get better, a dynamic he termed resistance:

…the [therapeutic] situation led me at once to the theory that by means of my psychical  [i.e., psychological] work I had to overcome a psychical force in the patients which was opposed to the pathogenic ideas becoming conscious…. This work of overcoming resistances is the essential function of analytic treatment…. (Studies on Hysteria by Freud (with J. Breuer), 1893, Vol. II, p. 268; Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, 1917, Vol. XVI, p. 451).(1)