Cover of the book “Resistance in psychotherapy”

Publications

Thomas Abel: Resistance in Psychotherapy

The Eight Forms – Clinical Approaches and Meaning in the Therapeutic Process

  • The book will be published in German by Springer/Nature in June 2025 and in English in the USA in February 2026. It has about 150 pages.

  • Flap text: Patients enter psychotherapy because they suffer from distressing symptoms or relationship problems and want to change something about them. At the same time, change is frightening: on the one hand, it calls into question an often painstakingly achieved psychological balance. On the other hand, the many abysses that patients must overcome on their developmental path still lie shrouded in fog. That is why they oppose the therapeutic process of change with various forms of resistance from the very beginning. This volume explores how this phenomenon is understood across different therapeutic approaches and what it means in clinical work. The eight forms of resistance identified in psychoanalysis are presented in detail using illustrative case vignettes. The book highlights the importance of the psychodynamic principle that resistance must be addressed before the underlying content can be explored and shows why all forms of therapy risk failure when it is not recognized and worked through.
  • The Author: Thomas Abel is a licensed psychotherapist, psychoanalyst, trauma therapist, ISTFP-certified therapist in Transference-Focused Psychotherapy (TFP), group analyst, supervisor and training analyst. He is based in Berlin, where he works in private practice within the German public health system. He also teaches at several psychotherapy and psychoanalytic training institutes.
  • The translation was done with the help of artificial intelligence. A subsequent human revision was done primarily in terms of content.
  • Copyright 2026 by springer
  • From September 10, 2025, I will be offering a Zoom lecture series in German on important topics described in the book. Participation is free of charge without prior registration.

  

Handbook of object relations psychology

Flap text:

In the beginning, psychoanalysis focused on drive conflicts, but since then the entire wealth of human desires and needs, as well as fears, feelings of shame and guilt, have been taken into consideration. They always have to do with the other, the “object” that the desiring person is looking for. Object-relations psychology expands Freud’s dual drive theory to include a wealth of central basic human needs and represents the mainstream of psychoanalysis today. The handbook edited by Thomas Abel is the first basic work to comprehensively present the most important concepts of object relations psychology. It offers a structured and easy-to-understand overview of the most important concepts of modern psychoanalysis.

Articles by me in journals and chapters in books by other editors

  • 2020 – Thomas Abel: The eighth life – Conflicts about generativity in the psychoanalytic movement using the example of the history of object relations psychology. In: Moeslein-Teising, I.; Schä̈fer, G. and Martin, R. (ed.): Generativität. Giessen: Psychosozial-Verlag. Pages 231-242
  • 2020 – Thomas Abel: From inner images to object representations – lifestyle analysis and “central relationship conflict theme”. in: Wahl, P. (ed.): Education and inner images. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, pages 120-133
  • 2013 – Thomas Abel: Resistance analysis based on dreams. In: Janta, B.; Unruh, B. and Walz-Pawlita, S. (eds.): The dream. Gießen: Psychosozial-Verlag, pages 147-162
  • 2011 – Thomas Abel: Gypsy girl: The foreign citizen as a mass phenomenon. Journal for Individual Psychology, 36, pages 162-173
  • 2011 – Thomas Abel: We cannot not communicate: On the impossibility of not working intersubjectively. Journal of Individual Psychology 36, pages 270-274.
  • 2005 – Thomas Abel: Godfather Death: the dangers of a common defense
    of experiences of powerlessness in psychotherapy. in: Springer, A.; Gerlach, A. und Schlösser, A.M. (eds.): Power and powerlessness. Giessen: Psychosozial-Verlag. Pages 247-256