Cover of the book “Resistances in psychotherapies” from Thomas Abel

Publications

Thomas Abel: Resistance in psychotherapy

Forms, settings and treatment

The book will be published in German by Springer/Nature in June 2025 and in English in the USA in October 2025 with a foreword by Otto Kernberg. It has about 150 pages. The prices that have been set so far are 29.99€ in Germany, 30.83€ in Austria and 33.50CHF in Switzerland.

Flap text:

Patients undergo psychotherapy because they are suffering from distressing symptoms or relationship problems and want to change something. At the same time, changes are frightening from the very first step: on the one hand, they call into question the psychological balance that has usually been painstakingly achieved. On the other hand, many of the abysses that patients have to overcome on their path of development are still shrouded in fog. This is why they put up various obstacles to the therapeutic process of change from the very beginning. This textbook shows what concepts individual therapy methods have of resistance and what resistance means in psychotherapeutic as well as somatic treatment (compliance). The eight forms of resistance that psychoanalysis distinguishes are presented in detail using case vignettes. It is made clear why the rule applies in psychodynamic therapies: “Resistance processing before content processing” and why therapies of all directions can fail due to resistance that is not understood and not processed.

  

Handbook of object relations psychology

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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