A Primer on Working with Resistance

by Martha Stark

"Martha Stark's primer on resistance is a unique book. It takes as the heart of the clinical problem the patient's reluctance to change, that ubiquitous and paradoxical phenomenon of our work in which people come to us asking for help in changing, and then do their level best to keep change from happening... This is a work which is at once a practical guide and a theoretical tour de force. Readers who journey in this slim volume with Dr. Stark will return from their travels to their practice much educated, having encountered new ideas and old ones in new forms, better able to face the everyday travails of psychotherapy." -David E. Scharff, M.D. "Every so often a book emerges from the vast sea of analytic writings that startles in its creativity and usefulness. A Primer on Working with Resistance is just such a book. Dr. Stark is as clear as a bell. She manages complex theoretical concepts with sophistication and great sensitivity for the material. For example, the distinctions she makes between convergent and divergent conflict, or between illusion and distortion, are elegant. The question and answer format of the book is reassuring for the beginner, and a delight for the more experienced reader as well." -Anne Alonso, Ph.D., Harvard Medical School A Jason Aronson Book

Genres: Psychology

278 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1994

Reviews

[Dovilė Stonė · Rating 5 out of 5]

“As the patient discovers that he survives his confrontations with
reality, the defenses to which he has clung since earliest childhood in order
not to have to feel the pain of his knowing those truths become ever less
necessary. As he lets go of his defenses and his infantile attachments, as he
overcomes his resistance, he becomes freer to experience reality as it is.
Infantile, unrealistic hope is transformed into mature, realistic hope. Need is
transformed into capacity, as the need to experience reality in ways determined
by the past is transformed into the capacity to know and to accept reality as
it is. The repetition compulsion is transformed into a capacity to experience
things anew.”