Resistance occupies a central and contested position across the depth-psychology corpus, functioning simultaneously as obstacle, protector, diagnostic signal, and—in certain philosophical registers—as the very condition of form itself. Freud established the canonical clinical usage: resistance appears when free association encounters the censorship mechanism guarding unconscious material, its strength varying inversely with the accessibility of repressed content. This foundational formulation undergoes significant extension in the group-therapy literature, particularly in Flores, where resistance ramifies into individual, dyadic, and group-as-a-whole phenomena, taking forms as varied as silence, boredom, excessive intellectualization, and flight into extra-therapeutic topics. Levine’s somatic reading represents a decisive revaluation: resistance is reconceived as protective intelligence encoded in the body, to be approached indirectly and with pacing rather than confronted or dismantled. McGilchrist introduces a still more fundamental ontological dimension, drawing on Schelling to argue that architective resistance within continuous flow is the very condition by which differentiated forms—including mind—arise at all. Romanyshyn’s phenomenological tradition treats researcher resistance as symptomatic embodied knowing, a carrier of undigested affective material. Religious and ascetic corpora (the Philokalia, Climacus) employ cognate concepts in the register of spiritual combat. Together, these positions reveal resistance as irreducibly ambivalent: it simultaneously impedes therapeutic progress and constitutes the structural integrity that makes growth possible.