Otto Rank, an intimate of Freud and an important earlier contributor to the growth of psychoanalysis, was singularly important in recognizing the kinship of the creative process of the artist and the everyday activities of ordinary people. For this reason, and others, his was a major influence on the develop ment of Gestalt therapy. All contact is creative adjustment, not only contact which results in new solutions and vistas. The vitality of free functioning is worlds away from the dullness of apathy and indifference and the peculiar urgency, the driven quality which accompa nies so much unsatisfying behavior. Though the lively, uniquely varied responses and reactions of free functioning are lacking, replaced by contacting that is routinized and stereotypic, this is creative adjustment.
Creativity can serve many ends.
Resistance is the usual psychological charac terization for the individual's seeming unwillingness to change or grow, or to accept the therapist's direction. Implied in it is the conviction that the person in therapy being resistant should stop doing so. But resistance is creative adjustment, and organismic self-regulation. It is integral to the indi vidual's way of being in the world, and no approach driving at holistic solutions can ask a person to set aside parts of themselves. According to this principle, and as will be seen in the succeeding chapters of this volume, Gestalt therapy practice replaces the conventional emphasis on overcoming, breaking through, or ignoring resistances with procedures which encourage and explore these creative adjustments.