How do we position ourselves in relation to our patients? Do we participate as neutral object, as empathetic self-object, or as authentic subject? Do we strive to enhance the patient's knowledge, to provide a corrective experience, or to work at the intimate edge?

How do we position ourselves, moment by moment, in relation to our patients and how do these positions inform both what we come to know about our patients and how we intervene? Do we participate as neutral object, as empathic self-object, or as authentic subject? Do we strive to enhance the patient's knowledge, to provide a corrective experience, or to work at the intimate edge? In an effort to answer these and other clinically relevant questions about the process of psychotherapeutic change, Martha Stark has developed a comprehensive theory of therapeutic action that integrates the...

"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...