The Resistance Movement for Subjectivity: A Humanistic Standpoint on Psychotherapy and Psychological Theorization

Introduction

The concept of subject has a long intellectual history. Although, it can be traced back to earlier traditions, such as medieval interpretations of Aristotle by the French philosopher and mathematician Nicole Oresme (Guilhaumou, 2008), Foucault (1994) reintroduced its definition into contemporary debate:

“Il y a deux sens au mot ‘sujet’: sujet soumis à l’autre par le contrôle et la dépendance, et sujet attaché à sa propre identité par la conscience ou la connaissance de soi. Dans les deux cas, ce mot suggère une forme de pouvoir qui subjugue et assujetti.” (p. 227) ¹

Following Foucault, Julien (2015), an anthropologist and sociologist at the Université de Lorraine, notes that the terms subject and subjectivity are polysemic and used differently across fields such as psychotherapy, anthropology, medicine, neuroscience, and law. In the social sciences, the concept of the subject describes how individuals are both agents of their actions and shaped by social, political, and cultural forces that extend beyond them. This dual process allows individuals to belong to a group while internalizing and transmitting its practices and meanings across generations.

In a similar vein, the historian Guilhaumou (2008), drawing on Mead (1934), argues that the individual is partly constituted through a socially shaped self-oriented toward recognition, while nonetheless maintaining an irreducibly unique standpoint. From this perspective, subjective narratives cannot be fully captured within a nomothetic framework. As Evans et al. (2023) observe, “applying general rules across individuals is in tension with examining that which is unique to any individual” (p. 13).

In psychotherapy, the participants live the subjective experience turning into a particular kind of exchange permeating the inner life of the contributors, the self-understanding, and the capacity for meaning-making. When the early 20th-century collaboration among Sigmund Freud, Alfred Adler, and their contemporaries is reimagined through this lens, their gatherings appear not merely as scientific enterprises, nor as the founding moment of a resistant movement, but as a historically situated continuation of an already established philosophical current. Rather than being understood as the “fathers” of a defense of subjectivity, Sigmund Freud, Alfred Adler, and their colleagues may be seen as inheritors and clinical translators of phenomenological concerns articulated earlier by thinkers such as Brentano (1874/1995), Dilthey (1910/1976), Maine de Biran (1807/2001), and later Husserl (1913/1982) – concerns centered on lived experience, intentionality, and the irreducibility of meaning in human life. From this perspective, their work represents an early psychotherapeutic articulation of a broader resistance movement. The one that is postulated here is not one of opposition with science; rather, it is more likely to be defined through its quality of preserving the specific approach of the person’s subjectivity and narrative.

Perspectives from different domains like Art Brut, literature and painting, but also psychology, seem preoccupied with the topic of resistance before a certain dissolution of the human subject since the era of Late Modernity – a historical/sociological term for the advanced, often chaotic phase of modernity, starting around the Industrial/French Revolutions (late 18th C.) and continuing to the present. Therefore, building on communalities of these different perspectives, this article proposes to explore the concepts of subjectivity, resistance, and rebelliousness, building on a philosophical continuum, appreciating the subtle variances, and contemplating the implications of a new viewpoint. For several reasons, I propose to draw more on Alfred Adler’s case to describe the notion of resistance in relation to subjectivity. The first one is coming from my experience in the field of psychotherapy, gained through my background, training, and interest in understanding Adler, meanwhile going beyond his theory and practice. Secondly, since the onset of my formation and clinical experience in Switzerland, the context of daily basis encountering with colleagues from other approaches (Behavioral-Cognitive, Dialectical-Behavioral, Systemic, Psychoanalytic, Jungian, and Rogerian) incited me to search for a meaningful common denominator in this multiverse of psychotherapies. Adler’s experience seemed to make a suitable landmark in this reflection. Beyond the psychodynamic dimension of his therapeutic approach, Alfred Adler may also be understood as both a proto-humanist and a proto-systemician insofar as his psychology foregrounds meaning, purpose, ethical social embeddedness, and holistic relational patterns decades before the formal emergence of humanistic psychology and systemic psychotherapy. Thirdly, the work to this present paper offered the possibility to confront the myth of Adler as rebel, and to suggest a reading of Adler as a member of a resistance movement. Where the most of us see a break, this text proposes a more subtle common ground. Adler and Freud, but many others before and after them, in my humble view, shared a fundamental interest in subjectivity and could integrate the underground stream of people who preserve the re-centering on the individual’s subjective experience.

An Underground Stream: Resistance Movement for Subjectivity

Resistance movements have historically emerged in response to systems of domination such as wartime occupation, authoritarian regimes, colonialism, and apartheid. These movements – sometimes armed – were driven by the shared imperative to oppose oppressive power structures and reclaim autonomy. Iconic examples include the Resistance during World War II, the U.S. Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s, and long-standing anti-colonial struggles across Africa, Asia, and the Americas (Britannica, 2024).

These movements aimed not only to protect physical sovereignty but also to defend individual and collective meaning against homogenizing power. Yet, despite a shared goal, resistance movements were rarely monolithic. They included ideological disagreements and conflicting strategies. Therefore, a key insight could be that resistance is not a uniform act of rebellion but a constellation of efforts to preserve meaning, identity, and voice under threat.

A different but equally revealing perspective on resistance emerges from the realm of Art Brut. Peiry (2020), former director of the Lausanne Museum of Art Brut and a widely recognized scholar of outsider art, invites us to consider what she described as a constellation at the heart of Art Brut creation: silence, secret, and solitude – conditions she has also emphasized in her published work, particularly in relation to creators who develop their productions à huis clos, apart from institutional or social expectations. These elements, she explained, form the inner ground from which raw, uninstitutionalized expressions emerge. To this constellation, Peiry (2001) added a fourth dimension: resistance – a refusal to conform to the norms that regulate collective life and artistic legitimacy, consistent with her broader characterization of Art Brut creators as working independently of cultural frameworks and often in implicit defiance of them. Peiry’s four concepts could also serve as metaphors for a broader psychological form of resistance – one that does not necessarily arise through overt opposition, but rather through a sustained commitment to subjective life, an approach preserving the personal meaning, and authenticity.

A parallel phenomenon is observed taking place in literature and aesthetics. Vancu (2016), a Romanian scholar and writer, in his book Elegie pentru uman ² argues that the Late Modernity era witnessed a dissolution of the human subject that could be seen in poetry, novels, and painting. Late Modernity’s technical and industrial advances reshaped society. Human beings came to be viewed less as subjects of lived experience, and more as instruments of productivity within an economic machine. Society was increasingly organized according to efficiency and output, reducing individuals to “human resources” whose value was tied to labor performance. Vancu reads modern literary history (from authors like Ezra Pound to Mircea Cărtărescu) through this lens, showing how certain writers resisted the anti-human currents of their times and understood literature as a way back toward the human – toward empathy and lived experience that modernity tends to estrange.

In the domain of psychology and psychotherapy, similar undercurrents of resistance can be traced. From the early 19th century onward, certain thinkers and practitioners operated at the margins of mainstream psychology, advocating for richer, more nuanced understandings of the human experience. Their work often stood in contrast to the rising dominance of positivist, behaviorist, or mechanistic models.

Handlbauer’s (1998) historical study of the early psychoanalytic movement provides evidence for this interpretation. He portrays the Wednesday Psychoanalytic Society, founded by Sigmund Freud, as a kind of intellectual underground.

“The evenings were animated by an air of conspiracy that derived from the ever-perceptible hostility aimed at psychoanalysis. Fürtmuller (1965, p. 339) spoke of ‘a sort of a catacomb romanticism – a small and daring group, persecuted now, but bound to conquer the world.’ According to Leupold-Löwenthal (1981, pp. 326f.), the feeling of belonging together was strengthened ‘by the real and fantasized reflection by an academic environment experienced as largely hostile,’ even though during the years before World War I in Vienna, ‘the open refusal of psychoanalysis was rather the exception.’” (p. 24)

The minutes of the Society, as cited by Handlbauer, reveal a striking composition:

“[. . .] different as they were in their backgrounds and personalities . . . were held together by their common discontent with the conditions that prevailed in psychiatry, education, and other fields dealing with the human mind. The members predominantly came from the liberal Jewish intellectual class, having medical training, philosophical formation, and literary ambitions; their interest in a comprehensive understanding of human nature could not be satisfied by contemporary psychology.” (pp. 29–30)

This foundational community – diverse in temperament but unified in purpose – embodied the essence of resistance: an underground movement in search of deeper truths about the mind, experience, and the human condition. Of course, as with any resistance, internal competition emerged. As psychoanalysis evolved and grew in influence, figures like Alfred Adler, Carl Gustav Jung, Sandor Ferenczi began developing distinct schools of thought. Distancing themselves from Freud reflected theoretical divergence but also underscored a broader pattern: the struggle for subjectivity which in psychology has been marked not only by resistance to a mainstream, but also by negotiation and competition within its own ranks.

During the fertile early years of the early 20th century, Lou Andreas-Salomé (1861–1937) was closely associated with the psychoanalytic current in Vienna between 1912 and 1913. In her journal, she documented the challenges faced during that period and her perspective supports what I imagined as a resistance attitude to a normative mainstream:

“[S]cientific objections would be justified here, and the whole difference between science of nature and science of the mind, rather like between chemistry and psychology, opens up wide here, where it’s a question of a difference between things that are quantitatively measurable and immeasurable, i.e. impossible to characterize other than qualitatively.” (p. 42)

Andreas-Salomé encountered Adler as well during this period. Despite Adler’s interest in winning her over to his outlook, she maintained her allegiance to Sigmund Freud and psychoanalytic theory. This may have been because it aligned more closely with her intellectual pursuits. However, despite her theoretical inclinations, Andreas-Salomé demonstrated a keen awareness of the distinction between the biological realm and the psychological-phenomenological approach to comprehending the individual. In December 1912, she expressed:

“What counts for all the sciences of the mind also counts here in the highest and most decisive degree: that we only know what we ‘experience.’” (pp. 43–44)

As we have seen until now, a loosely connected lineage of theorists, clinicians, artists, and thinkers have manifested their interest, not always explicitly, to the inner life of the person and individual subjectivity. From Freud’s circle to Peiry’s artists of silence and Vancu’s poets, the thread of resistance is consistent: it defends the human individual experience, narrative, and uniqueness where systems tend to flatten, normalize, and measure. Though diverse in theory and practice, all these people share a common commitment under what could be seen as the underground stream of a Resistance Movement for Subjectivity.

Alfred Adler’s Position Under the Pressure of Modernity

Using the metaphor of resistance – derived from political history, but echoed in all these different domains as a sustained commitment to subjective life – I am highlighting how early psychotherapeutic communities functioned as intellectual “undergrounds.” Rather than opposing science, this resistance conserves the irreducibility of subjective meaning and personal narrative, positioning psychotherapy as a marginal yet enduring countercurrent within modern psychology and Late Modernity more broadly.

Alfred Adler (1870–1937) lived and worked during the height of Late Modernity era. This is a period that stretched roughly from 1789 to the late 20th century (Revonsuo, 2009). During this era, consciousness and subjectivity were largely sidelined by scientific psychology, which prioritized objectivity and measurement. Revonsuo (2009) observes that behaviorism – and later, cognitive approaches – became the dominant research paradigms. The study of subjective consciousness was, for much of this time, ignored or dismissed as unscientific. Either Revonsuo in psychology or Vancu in literature sheds light on the climate in which Adler lived and worked. Within this cultural and intellectual context, Adler emerges as a significant figure in the Resistance Movement for Subjectivity.

Rebellion could be seen more as an emotional, reactive posture – frequently impulsive and aimed at disrupting the status quo without a coherent or constructive alternative. In contrast, it seems to me that resistance is more deliberate: it reflects a conscious and often principled effort to withstand dominant pressures while preserving space for alternative understandings. Where rebellion disrupts, resistance preserves – especially the right to subjective experience and personal meaning in the face of prevailing norms. Confronted to the positivist and mechanistic models dominant in early 20th-century psychology, Adler preserved an interest in individual as socially embedded yet irreducibly unique, oriented toward meaning, purpose, and creative self-interpretation. His position rather than assuming one’s perspective is universally valid, one that begins to embrace the limitations of knowledge, and the irreducible complexity of human life. For the therapist especially, this perspective opens the door to a more phenomenological stance – one that honors the patient’s unique experience rather than diagnosing from a distance. As Vancu (2016) writes, this is an attempt “to reconstruct the human. . . this empathy, this attention to the other, this reactivity to the suffering of the other” (p. 84). In this light, Adlerian therapy becomes an act of ethical and humanist resistance – one rooted in presence, not rebellion.

Alfred Adler’s Individual Psychology approach and his focus on education – especially child development – can be read as an explicit effort to counter this dehumanizing tendency. By empowering children to become active participants in their own growth, he worked to prevent the shaping of passive, utilitarian identities within a mechanized social order. Yet despite these contributions, Adler is still often seen through the lens of rebellion. He is portrayed as the rebel – the disruptor of psychoanalytic orthodoxy (Ellis et al., 2009) – who broke away from Freud. Even within Adlerian circles, some (Pollak, 2017) continue to interpret his estrangement from Freud as rebelliousness through the lens of his birth order – noting his second-born position and positing that his lifelong quest for independence and recognition stemmed from sibling rivalry. Nevertheless, according to my perspective, Adler was fated to resist both his older brother and, later, Freud himself.

The Modernity Between Poetry and Diagnosis: The Human Subject in Crisis

In his Elegie pentru uman, Vancu (2016) argues that the vast human atrocities of the modern age were not merely historical accidents but were made possible by a systematic suppression of emotion and empathy, as Modernity prioritized efficiency, scientism, and technocratic utopias. The vision of “the new man” came at the cost of sacrificing subjectivity on the altar of collectivist and dehumanizing ideals. In response to this cultural climate, Vancu (2016) dedicates his book to “those who tried in the midst of modernity to resist this dehumanization” (p. 86).

When Freud convened his initial circle in 1902 – comprising four medical doctors: Alfred Adler, Wilhelm Stekel, Max Kahane, and Rudolf Reitler – his aim was to gather together some of Vienna’s most promising minds interested in psychology, dreams, and the exploration of the unconscious. They worked in a time increasingly dominated by industrial rationalization, when human beings were often perceived as mere units of labor, value, and productivity. The cultural emphasis on quantification and efficiency eclipsed a more nuanced engagement with the individual’s lived experience and personal meaning.

The tension between nomothetic explanation and the defense of lived subjectivity that would later surface within the Viennese psychoanalytic movement did not emerge in an intellectual vacuum. It can be traced to a much older philosophical debate about the nature of the human mind and the legitimacy of subjective experience as a source of knowledge. Early modern philosophy already contained the seeds of this divide. On the one hand, empiricist thinkers such as Locke (1690/1975) grounded the study of mind in experience, arguing that mental life arises from sensation and reflection rather than from innate metaphysical structures. Locke’s project opened the possibility of a psychology based on observation of mental phenomena, but it also encouraged later tendencies to treat mental processes as analyzable elements governed by general laws.

At the same time, other philosophers emphasized the active and internally organized nature of mental life. Leibniz (1704/1981), for example, proposed that consciousness rests upon countless “petites perceptions,” subtle mental processes that remain below the threshold of awareness but nevertheless shape experience. By acknowledging layers of mental activity not immediately accessible to consciousness, Leibniz anticipated later psychological models that would explore the dynamic organization of psychic life.

During the 19th and early 20th centuries, these philosophical strands gradually evolved into distinct psychological traditions. Empirical and experimental psychology increasingly pursued generalizable laws of mental functioning, while a parallel current – sometimes described as personalistic or subjectivistic psychology – sought to preserve the irreducible unity and intentionality of the person. Within this latter orientation, the individual was not understood merely as a bundle of measurable variables but as a purposive, meaning-creating center of experience. It is within this broader intellectual trajectory that later personality theorists such as Allport (1937) would explicitly argue that psychology must study the person as an integrated whole rather than reduce human behavior to abstract mechanisms or statistical regularities. Seen from this perspective, Adler’s Individual Psychology can be interpreted not simply as a divergence from Freud, but as part of a longer philosophical effort to articulate a psychology adequate to the complexity and dignity of the human person.

Within this broader philosophical background, it becomes easier to understand why certain intellectual influences were present in Vienna at the time. Before delving further into the evolution of this Viennese circle and the interests of its members for idiographic approach, defending the depth and specificity of individual experience, I would like to point out that a certain phenomenological approach was not estranged from some of these people. Until 1873, philosophy was a mandatory component of the medical curriculum at the University of Vienna. Franz Brentano (1838–1917), a forerunner of both the phenomenological movement and the analytic philosophical tradition, taught there and introduced students to a rigorous introspectionist method for describing consciousness from a first-person perspective. As Huemer (2002/2019) presents him, Brentano was a great teacher who had a big impact on the development of the phenomenology through his influence on the work of philosophers like Edmund Husserl, Alexius Meinong, Christian von Ehrenfels, Kasimir Twardowski, Carl Stumpf, and Anton Marty. Between 1874 and 1895, he was active at the University of Vienna and Schmidt’s (2017) research shows that Sigmund Freud (who studied medicine at the University of Vienna 1874–1881) followed Brentano’s courses for four semesters from 1874 to 1876, which planted seeds for what will become Freud’s theory on representations and associations. For both, Brentano and Freud, individual’s desire is not an independent thing, but a psychic object constructed from sensory data and shaped by our own representational capacities. Mental representations are defined primarily by their relational and intentional function – by what they are about and how they are organized within the subject – rather than by their accuracy in mirroring an external object. Psychic phenomena do not aim to reflect an objective structure inherent in the stimuli they receive (Schmidt, 2017, pp. 21–22).

With regard to Alfred Adler, it is true that he studied medicine at the same Viennese university from 1888 to 1895 (Hoffman, 1994), but there is no information that could confirm that he attended Brentano’s philosophical courses – who was still active in Vienna at the time. Much later in time, the name Alfred Adler appears in a registrar records (Quästurakten) preserved in the University Archive of Freiburg document with the attendees of Husserl’s (2001) winter semester lecture cycle in 1920 to 1921. The records indicate 176 names (without further biographical data) enrolled in the lecture course. Among them, a person listed as Alfred Adler. DeRobertis (2024) interprets this entry as evidence that the Viennese founder of Individual Psychology attended Husserl’s lectures, taking the possibility as historically suggestive given the notable conceptual affinities between Adlerian psychology, phenomenology, and later humanistic psychology. From the point of view of the philosophical-psychological bridge, bringing together Adler and Husserl is very tempting. DeRobertis argues that Adler’s psychology already anticipates themes central to phenomenology and humanistic psychology: the teleology of consciousness, the lived experience, the unity of the person, the meaning-orientation of behavior. Thus, he treats the Freiburg record as confirming an already existing theoretical affinity.

However, this registrar records needs to be treated with caution because this entry with the Viennese Alfred Adler remains uncertain. Major scholarly biographies (Edward Hoffman, Phyllis Bottom, Henri Ellenberger, and Heinz and Rowena Ansbacher) do not mention nor Adler’s attendance at Husserl’s lectures, neither his eventual travels to Freiburg in that period of time. As for the other sources of information, the largest archival collection is the Alfred Adler Papers from Library of Congress. The collection contains documents considered the most reliable record of his movements. But there is an important limitation: the majority of surviving correspondence begins after 1928, when Adler began working frequently in the United States. Thus, the archive does not cover the period of 1920 to 1921, and Adler’s presence in Freiburg at Husserl’s lectures is still an enigmatic point.

Meanwhile, following Heinz Ansbacher and Rowena Ansbacher’s classic formulation, Adler can be regarded as “the original field theorist in a dynamic or depth psychology which has a social-science and ‘subjectivistic’ orientation” (Adler, 1956, p. Preface). The same authors–editors in their rigorous study explicitly place Adler within a wider constellation of “subjective” psychologies – the personalistic psychology (William Stern, Gordon W. Allport, Gardner Murphy), Gestalt and field theory (Max Wertheimer, Solomon Asch, Kurt Lewin), and the Wilhelm Dilthey-Karl Jaspers tradition of Verstehen – which collectively resisted the reduction of subjectivity to physiological or behavioral variables (Adler, 1956, pp. 31–33).

Seen in this light, the early Viennese Psychoanalytic Society can be understood as a gathering of thinkers attempting to articulate a vision of the human being not as a machine or mechanism, but as a conscious, suffering, and striving subject. Within this collective, various seeds were planted: some blossomed into biological or mechanistic theories, while others developed into a sustained defense of subjective integrity.

Andreas-Salomé (2000) entered the psychoanalytic world as an outsider – not a physician but a thinker, writer, and cultural interlocutor. Her personal journal reveals her concern with the encroachment of academic, mechanistic psychology, and her alignment with a deeper, more humanistic current. On 6 April 1913, Lou Andres-Salomé wrote in her personal journal the following:

“The reason why it [Psychoanalysis] seems so alive is not a blown mixture of science and sectarianism, but the fact that it elevates to the rank of its principle of life the highest of all sciences: a perfect honesty, which it never ceases to make use of right down to the heart of the most individual reality, thus dominating the life of science – just as it bases its scientific achievement by making notions – the narrow, parched notions of academic psychology – bow before life. It is precisely because of this that, beyond this circle and more easily than anywhere else, splits and quarrels arise that are more difficult to iron out than anywhere else, without threatening the sequence of methods and results.” (pp. 75–76)

For her, and others in that intellectual milieu, psychoanalysis represented a rare space where academic norms could be challenged in the name of human depth. Yet, as the psychoanalytic movement grew in stature, its internal priorities began to shift. In an effort to gain scientific legitimacy, psychoanalysis gradually adopted a more objectivist, nomothetic framework, privileging general laws over unique individual stories. Freud’s own theoretical evolution illustrates this shift. While he initially sought to explore both conscious and unconscious dimensions, he increasingly emphasized the primacy of the unconscious, as we can see in this little citation by Antti Revonsuo:

“[T]he unconscious must be accepted as the general basis of psychic life. The unconscious is the larger circle which includes the smaller circle of the conscious; everything conscious has a preliminary unconscious stage, whereas the unconscious can stop at this stage and yet claim to be considered a full psychic function.” (Revonsuo, 2009, loc. 2121)

In Freud’s later model, the unconscious becomes the central explanatory mechanism, potentially reducing the full, living complexity of the person to an object of general theory. While powerful, this theoretical move comes at a cost: the erasure of the unified, evolving, conscious self. For his part, Adler defended a model in which consciousness and unconsciousness were not opposed but interacting elements of a single psyche. The very name of his theory – Individual Psychology – reflects this integrative vision. Etymologically, the term individual derives from the Latin individuus – meaning “not divisible.” As Douglas (2022) reminds us:

“Individual: early 15c., ‘one and indivisible, inseparable’ (with reference to the Trinity), from Medieval Latin individualis, from Latin individuus ‘indivisible,’ from in- ‘not, opposite of’ (see in- (1)) + dividuus ‘divisible,’ from dividere ‘divide’ (see divide (v.)).” (Douglas, 2022)

Adler’s theory thus asserts that a person is not merely a collection of competing parts or instincts, but a whole, intentional being – irreducible to mechanics or diagnostics. He put an emphasis on the “subjective image” through which individuals interpret the world (Adler, 1956, pp. 182–183) and on fictional goals shaped by ethical and social ideals. He was itself nurtured by his philosophical interlocutors (Hans Vaihinger’s “as if” theory) and early collaborators (Carl Furtmüller’s ethical critique of psychoanalysis; Adler, 1956, p. Preface). Later social-psychoanalytic and humanistic theorists such as Karen Horney, Erich Fromm, Gordon W. Allport, Carl Rogers, and Abraham Maslow developed their own, sometimes more explicit, movements of resistance to objectivism while appropriating key Adlerian insights about the socially embedded, purposive subject (Watts, 2015, pp. 128–129).

My aim here is not to rehash debates between Adlerian and Freudian schools – discussions that have already been well developed – but rather to illuminate the cultural-intellectual environment in which these theories emerged. This was a time of profound tension between dehumanizing abstraction and lived human reality. Many brilliant thinkers were engaged, whether implicitly or explicitly, in a struggle to preserve the integrity of human subjectivity against the objectifying forces of their time.

Resisting Reduction: Consciousness, Meaning, and the Idiographic Turn

At that period of time in the United States, behaviorism was becoming the dominant paradigm in psychological science. Spearheaded by John B. Watson and later B. F. Skinner, behaviorism dismissed any serious consideration of subjective experience, introspection, or consciousness (Mansager & Garrison, 2022). Whether behaviorists outright denied the existence of consciousness or simply deemed it unscientific is still debated. What is clear, however, is that behaviorism’s ascendency contributed to a decades-long suppression of psychological inquiry into consciousness and lived experience. As Revonsuo (2009) notes, consciousness became a near-taboo subject in academic psychology until its resurgence in the late 1980s.

From this perspective, Freud’s early group – himself, Adler, and the others – could be considered as part of a countercurrent, resisting the reductionist logic of behaviorism. Freud’s theory, though eventually systematized into an objective framework, was originally rooted in subjective phenomena: dreams, free associations, transference, and the unconscious. Even before the founding of the Wednesday Psychological Society, Freud was exploring the terrain of inner life with the tools of narrative and introspection.

However, as Freud sought legitimacy within the scientific community, his later work became increasingly theoretical, structural, and system-building, moving beyond idiographic clinical observation toward general psychological laws. While it is true that over the years he became disillusioned with a strictly empirical or laboratory-scientific psychology, several authors such as Grubich-Simitis (1997), Ricoeur (1970), and Sulloway (1992) have noted that Freud’s metapsychology becomes more systemic, structural, and oriented toward universal mechanisms, particularly in the development of the instinct theory and the structural model.

In resisting both the objectivist turn in Freud and the behaviorist turn in American psychology, Adler carved out a distinctive path that emphasized meaning, purpose, and relational existence. His theory highlighted concepts such as the schema of apperception as a fundament of the unique interpretation of the individual’s place in this world, the fictional goal as teleological understanding of the nature of behavior, and the interpersonal dynamic exchange through Gemeinschaftsgefühl, offering a comprehensive model rooted in phenomenology. Ansbacher (1956) offers a clear summary of this position, noting that for Adler, “the unconscious as well as the conscious is determined by subjective values and interests” (p. 9). In this model, the individual is not merely a product of instinctual drives or environmental stimuli, but a creative interpreter, continuously constructing a meaningful worldview.

In 1911, Adler resigned from Freud’s circle, despite holding the position of President of the Society (Ellenberger, 1994, p. 605). Over the next decades, he would continue to refine his theory and therapeutic practice, even while other psychological schools gained prominence. During the First World War, Adler served as a physician on the front lines, and in the interwar period he returned to his psychological work (Ellenberger, 1994, pp. 607–608). Yet it was Freud’s psychoanalysis and Watson’s behaviorism that gained dominance in their respective contexts – one claiming the unconscious, the other erasing it altogether.

This same historical moment was marked by intensifying industrialization, economic upheaval, and the eventual collapse of the U.S. financial system in 1929. It was in this period of mechanization, massification, and economic abstraction that Adler continued to develop a theory grounded in the concrete, ethical, and experiential realities of individual human beings. His approach offered a vital counterbalance to both behaviorism’s denial of inner life and psychoanalysis’s detachment from conscious agency.

Conclusions

This article has proposed a processual understanding of resistance as a movement for subjectivity – an underground stream through which clinicians, artists, and writers preserve the irreducibility of lived meaning under the late-modern pressures of abstraction, normalization, and nomothetic system-building. Anchored in Foucault’s (1994) double sense of the subject concept, the framework clarifies why resistance is not adequately captured by the language of rebellion or mere opposition. Instead, the form of resistance highlighted here is preservative: it protects the idiographic conditions of voice, narrative, and first-person meaning that allow a person to remain a subject, socially embedded yet irreducibly singular. The ethical and clinical stakes of this stance resonate with humanistic psychology’s concern for freedom and responsibility (May, 1981) and with phenomenological commitments to describing experience as it is lived (Giorgi, 2009). To take one’s place in a Resistance Movement for Subjectivity, on this account, is not to reject science, but to preserve the person within explanatory totalities.

The psychotherapeutic field, from its earliest days – dating back to Freud’s Wednesday meetings – sought to preserve an idiographic stance, even if the term itself only gained traction much later. Nonetheless, the pressure to generalize has always loomed large, challenging phenomenological traditions and the clinician’s commitment to the uniqueness of each person. As Popper (1963) noted, even Adler sometimes drifted into generalization, particularly when seeking to publicly explain his work. In the consulting room, the idiographic stance comes more naturally; in the arena of theory and publication, the gravitational pull of general laws reasserts itself.

Returning to the beginning of this text, the linguistic poly-semantic of the terms subject and subjectivity influences the users, and brings the reflection to the limits of confusion of territories. Articulating further, an expressive example of this tension can be seen in the work of Cuban psychologist and theorist Fernando González Rey, who developed a cultural-historical and constructivist theory of subjectivity. For González Rey, subjectivity is neither purely individual nor merely a product of social forces. Rather, it emerges from symbolic processes embedded in social relations. This is a powerful and necessary perspective – subjectivity, in this view, is not simply shaped by the world but is actively constitutive of reality itself.

Yet from my clinical and psychotherapeutic standpoint, González Rey’s model risks overemphasizing social embeddedness at the expense of individual singularity. In his effort to critique classical psychodynamic models – especially the Freudian and Lacanian emphasis on intrapsychic and sexual dynamics – he builds a theory that, while nuanced, tends toward a systemic abstraction. His integrative ambitions can obscure the distinct voice and agency of the individual subject. For example, González Rey (2017) states:

“Subjectivity, from a cultural-historical standpoint, has an integrative function regarding the taxonomy of concepts traditionally used by psychology. At the same time, the definition of subjectivity proposed here remits an understanding of the individual subjective processes as part of cultural social realities, both of which are reciprocally configured” (p. 17).

This framing combines distinct levels of analysis. In trying to integrate subjectivity into broader cultural and social structures, it collapses the gap between social psychology and the psychotherapeutic focus on a person’s unique, first-person lived experience of the world, exploring how the individual perceives, interprets, and makes meaning from phenomena within their subjective reality. This conflation becomes particularly problematic when applied to psychotherapeutic practice, where the uniqueness of the individual cannot be understood merely as an effect of symbolic or political systems.

González Rey’s (2017) theory also claims to transcend entrenched dichotomies – such as subjective versus objective or internal versus external. However, in doing so, it risks dissolving the individual into an abstract system. He writes:

“It is not possible to reduce the emergence of the subjective disturbance to political reasons only, or to the functioning of normative repressive institutions. It is under these adverse conditions that individuals also emerge as subjects capable of resisting and opening up new alternatives when facing the dominant institutional forces. Despite being configured within the interweaving of societal forces, within a historically located cultural order, subjectivity is always beyond the processes engaged in its genesis.” (p. 12)

There is power in this claim. And yet, despite acknowledging individual agency, his theory tends to obscure the creative, idiographic character of personal meaning-making placed at the heart of subjective understanding of life. According to Heinz and Ansbacher (1956), Adlerian psychology is rooted in the idea that individuals do not merely react to life but actively construct their worldview through a creative power. The individual subject is situated socially but not dissolved within the social.

Recent scholarship by Levitt-Frank and Shoshana (2023) explores the legacy of Adlerian subjectivity in depth. Yet even their analysis, which seeks to defend Adler’s idiographic legacy, paradoxically draws upon González Rey’s social psychology – a theory that is, in many ways, in tension with the psychodynamic view of subjectivity they also endorse. In trying to connect these two traditions, they inadvertently fall into the same trap of conceptual confusion: integrating theories grounded in incompatible ontological and clinical assumptions.

This tendency – visible in much contemporary scholarship – risks obscuring the singular, lived experience of human beings behind elaborate theoretical structures. Researchers such as González Rey (psychology), Hall (2004) (literary theory), and Sharp (2020) (geography) bring valuable insights, but they remain embedded within a mainstream academic paradigms where nomothetic thinking and system-building tend to overshadow the individual voice.

As psychotherapists, we are called to meet each human being, attuned to the depth and complexity of their subjective experience. Engaging in therapeutic alliance, we carry a double mission: to accompany each individual as they navigate the difficult path of their own subjectivity, and to defend, on a broader level, the shared humanity that unites us all. This path is not without detours. We are constantly tempted – by economic pressures, academic ideologies, or institutional norms – to abandon our humanistic ground. At times, we may even find ourselves seduced by theoretical systems that promise certainty or universal truth. In those moments, we must remember to return to the core of our vocation: to stand with others in their search for meaning, direction, and self-understanding.

As we train in various schools of psychotherapy – whether behavioral-cognitive, psychodynamic, existential, systemic or integrative – we inevitably encounter theoretical conflicts and divisions. Yet beneath these differences lies a shared imperative: to safeguard and restore each person’s access to their own lived experience.

Today, we are called to take up our place in the Resistance Movement for Subjectivity – not out of nostalgia or ideological loyalty, but from the conviction that the human person still matters. In this age of abstraction, integration, and data, it is more vital than ever to protect the space where individual meaning, emotion, and agency emerge.