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This three-part edited collection of chapters considers the protean problem of resistance in psychotherapy. The term is defined and considered from several radically different psychological perspectives; the psychoanalytic approach in Part I consists of four chapters written by authorities in the field. The four chapters of Part II concern both cognitive and pure behavioral approaches. Part III contains eight brief chapters in which the authors were invited to comment on one another's contributions.
In the main, the authors remain focused and concise, but it is very obvious that resistance has a remarkably broad variety of definitions, and that some of these definitions are so different that the authors do not appear to be speaking of similar phenomena.
What is also clear is that these phenomena are quite important to all psychotherapists, of almost any theoretical persuasion. The book is about not so much classical “transference resistance,” although it deals with this. On a more generalized level, it is about patients who do not change when they ought to, in spite of a “sane” therapist's best efforts. Wachtel tentatively defines resistance as:
… not something that periodically comes up to disrupt theory. It is the track of the patient's conflict about changing, the way in which the sincere desire to change confronts the fears, misconceptions, and prior adaptative strategies that make change difficult. (p. xix)
This definition reflects a remarkably narrow-minded focus on the patient as the “resistor.” The contributors give scant attention to the problem of countertransference