Resistant Interactions: Child, Family, and Psychotherapist. Robert J. Marshall. New York:  Human Sciences Press, 1982.

Marshall has written an important book surveying developments in the concepts of resistance, transference, and countertransference from the beginning of the century to the present. He finds bridges and connections among disparate schools of therapy and seemingly very different clinicians, and reconciles the difference between support and interpretation techniques.

Surveying the literature, the author brings order to a vast amount of material: Freud's views on resistance are reviewed, as are those of later psychoanalysts who have been concerned with defining and clarifying resistance, establishing its types and functions, and finding techniques for its resolution. Resistance is viewed from psychoanalytic and non-psychoanalytic perspectives and important similarities are noted; contributions from cognitive, linguistic and developmental psychology sources are evaluated; and finally Marshall states his own position on resistance, and gives valuable and original concepts and treatment approaches.

Marshall summarizes the views of a number of schools: resistance was to be ignored; it was a healthy and useful sign; Freud viewed resistance pessimistically as opposing cure; Rogers, Horney, and Spotnitz consider its protective and homeostatic function. Marshall's position is that resistance

… is an intervening variable which is useful in understanding

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certain patterns of clinical behavior correlated with “no progress,” “negative therapeutic reaction,” and “therapeutic failure.”

Marshall notes that research on the resolution of resistance with children lagged behind that with adults. Melanie Klein virtually ignored resistance. Anna Freud, although later reversing her position, believed that children could not establish a “transference neurosis.” Child therapists were probably discouraged by the intensity, fragmentation and volatility of the preverbal child's emotions which induced severe and painful countertransference feelings. Declaring that children share all the resistances o