A Primer on Working with Resistance [Paperback]

Martha Stark (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 1, 1994 | ISBN-10: 1568210930 | ISBN-13: 978-1568210933 | Edition: 1St Edition

"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

Editorial Reviews

Review

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 forthe beginner, and a delight for the more experienced reader as well. (Anne Alonso, Ph.D. )

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. (Modell, Arnold H., M.D. )

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. (Morrison, Andrew P. 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. )

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.

Product Details

• Paperback: 278 pages
• Publisher: Jason Aronson, Inc.; 1St Edition edition (March 1, 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1568210930
• ISBN-13: 978-1568210933
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.9 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #900,002 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A clear, consise explanation of the theraputic relationship, July 7, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: A Primer on Working with Resistance (Paperback)

Dr. Stark weaves together the viewpoints of many different schools of theraputic thought while bringing her own facinating insights to bear in this wonderful book. Other authors in this field could take a lesson from the clarity of her prose. The best book I have ever read on the subject. Anyone seeking to better understand the theraputic relationship should read this book.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Look no further-this book is the clinician's "pearl of great price"!, August 7, 2009

By 

Samuel G. Miller Jr. (Sarasota, Florida) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: A Primer on Working with Resistance (Paperback)

As others have aptly noted, Dr. Stark's writing is exemplary for its clarity. Her prose style is lucid and user-friendly. Her own brilliance notwithstanding, her explanations are couched in direct, plain language. Her authorial tone is unfailingly unpretentious and respectful- to the reader, and also to the patient- about whom and for whose benefit she has written.
The book consists of three logically delineated parts. In Part One, Dr. Stark explains that resistance, in its many forms, always boils down to a failure to grieve. With exquisite parsimony, she equates the failure to grieve with avoidance of reality. Succinctly, she defines mental health as not needing the facts- about others, or oneself, or the world- to be other than they are. Part Two is devoted to explaining, first, how to listen well in relation to resistance, and second, how specifically to respond to the patient's particular need at any given moment in the therapeutic dialogue. Her masterful and enlightening discussion of the clinical transferences in Part Three culminates in her contention that the patient's "attainment of mature hope" is the "raison d'etre" of the psychotherapeutic endeavor.
Most compelling and invaluable of all, however, is her thorough, logically impeccable, and eminently practical enumeration of the kinds of statements needed to work expertly with a patient's resistance. The clinician who "reads, marks, learns and inwardly digests" Dr. Stark's uniquely designed "toolkit" of carefully calibrated therapeutic statements will have a credible claim to confidence and competence.
A better guide to working with resistance is hard to imagine. Any clinician who would learn, from a true master, what to say, and when, and why, and how, need look no further. Dr. Stark's "Primer" is the clinician's "pearl of great price."
(Review by Samuel Miller, M. A., Th.D., LMHC, NCC)-[...]
08-07-09.