A Primer on Working with Resistance - by Martha Stark (Paperback)

About the Book

"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 ...

Book Synopsis

"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. A Jason Aronson Book

Review Quotes

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.

A Primer on Working with Resistance is much broader than the title would suggest. Stark describes the entire panorama of the therapeutic encounter in a style that is forthright, simple to understand and yet not oversimplified. Martha Stark manages to offer practical advice within the context of a sophisticated reading of psychoanalytic theory. A Primer on Working with Resistance is an invaluable and unique guide.

Emphasizing from the beginning the primacy of one's relationship to the object in addition to the roles of drive and of self, Stark weaves a challenging, cohesive thread originating from parental trauma and reactive defenses against grieving, which serve to preserve a relationship to the early object at the expense of what she refers to as 'illusion' and 'distortion.' The goal of treatment becomes the search to replace traumatic frustration and need with 'capacity, ' and with the bravery of facing the unbearable reality of parental fallibility and abusiveness.

About the Author

Martha Stark, M.D., a graduate of the Harvard Medical School and the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute, is a psychiatrist/psychoanalyst in private practice in Newton Centre, Massachusetts. Dr. Stark is on the faculty of both the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute and the Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis. She is also a Clinical Instructor in Psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School, has a teaching appointment at the Massachusetts Mental Health Center, and is on the faculty of the Center for Psychoanalytic Studies at the Massachusetts General Hospital.