Although these two books were issued in the same year, Working with Resistance was written first and includes the theoretical foundations for the author's system of psychotherapy and will be discussed first.

This book is much more than a treatise on resistance. It is a serious effort to present an eclectic system of psychotherapy, drawing on a theory of conflict, the object relations theories of Klein, Fairbairn, Winnicott, Modell, and Meissner, and the self psychology of Kohut.

Stark sees resistance not in terms of conflict between id impulses and ego defenses; she proposes a broad view that “on a macroscopic level, there is a tension within the patient between those forces that press yes and those counterforces that insist no, a tension between positive and negative, healthy and unhealthy” (p. 2). She believes that there is a basic conflict between “the patient's healthy wish to change and his unhealthy resistance to change” (p. 3).