1. Anything that impedes the work of analysis in psychoanalysis. It manifests in therapy as a reluctance to talk about a particular topic, or more generally as evasiveness in conversation, thus inhibiting the flow of free association that Freud, Anna’s model of psychotherapy depends upon. But it does not only refer to an unwillingness to disclose aspects of one’s life to someone else. In psychoanalysis the most potent form of resistance is to be seen in an analysand’s unwillingness to trust their analyst, which impacts on the process of transference that is the bedrock of the therapeutic encounter. Resistance also manifests in the reluctance certain analysands express regarding the need to give up on their symptoms---in this sense it points to an attachment to the symptom and the jouissance derived from that attachment. 2. A general term in critical and cultural theory for any non-violent act of cultural or social defiance of hegemony power. The term is most widely used in Cultural Studies, which---somewhat over-optimistically, it has to be said---in some cases is prepared to see even so simple an act as wearing jeans to work or school as resistive because it defies certain social conventions (now largely outmoded as a consequence). But this view of what resistance means is also criticized within Cultural Studies for being naive about the ease with which such acts of resistance are recuperated by power---in this case, it simply created a much larger market for jeans than previously existed. Consequently, resistance is probably better treated as a problematic rather than a social fact: ‘what counts as resistance?’ is a useful question to ask. ressentiment A vengeful, petty-minded state of being that does not so much want what others have (although that is partly it) as want others to not have what they have. The term, which might be translated as ‘resentment’, though in most places it is generally left in the original French, is usually associated with German philosopher Nietzsche, Friedrich, who defined it as a slave morality. Nietzsche sees ressentiment as the core of Christian and Judaic thought and, consequently, the central facet of western thought more generally. In this context, ressentiment is more fully defined as the desire to live a pious existence and thereby position oneself to judge others, apportion blame, and determine responsibility. Nietzsche did not invent the concept of ressentiment: it was a term that was very much ‘in the air’ in his lifetime (the late nineteenth century), as Jameson, Fredric points out in his sharp critique of the concept in The Political Unconscious (1981). Jameson’s quarrel with ressentiment, or more particularly Nietzsche’s deployment of it, is that the latter fails to consider the ideological weight the term carried in its own time; thus, in Jameson’s view Nietzsche fails to see that it is a category deployed by the ruling bourgeoisie elite to simultaneously justify their privileges and rationalize the denial of those same privileges to the poorer classes (on this view of things, the masses revolt not because their cause is just, but because they resent the rich). Further Reading: G. Deleuze Nietzsche and Philosophy (1983).