"Essay on Dreams," Jahrbuch, vol. II., p. 179.) The same thing applies to ambitendency. Neither is specific of schizophrenia, but applies equally to the neuroses and the normal. All that remains to katatonic negativism is the intentional contrast, i.e. the resistance. From this explanation we see that resistance is something different from ambivalency; it is the dynamic factor which makes manifest the ambivalency everywhere latent. What is characteristic of the diseased mind is not ambivalency but resistance. This implies the existence of a conflict between two opposite tendencies which has succeeded in raising the normally present ambivalency into a struggle of opposing components. (Freud has very aptly called this, "The separation of pairs of opposites.") In other words it is a conflict of wills, bringing about the neurotic condition of "disharmony within the self." This condition is the only "splitting of the psyche" known to us, and is not so much to be regarded as a predisposing cause, but rather as a manifestation resulting from the inner conflict—the "incompatibility of the complex" (Riklin).
Resistance, as the fundamental fact of schizophrenic dissociation, thus becomes something which, in contra-distinction to ambivalency, is not eo ipso identical with the concept of the state of feeling, but is a secondary and supplementary one, with its own special and quasi independent psychological development; and this is identical with the necessary previous history of the complex in every case. It follows that the theory of negativism coincides with the theory of the complex, as the complex is the cause of the resistance.
Bleuler summarises the causes of negativism as follows:
