Book excerpt: "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