RESISTANCE REGARDED AS AN ALLY IN PSYCHOTHERAPY

Odette Dumitru ()
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Odette Dumitru: Universitatea Titu Maiorescu

No 2011/319, Papers from Osterreichish-Rumanischer Akademischer Verein

Abstract: Patients strive to be good patients, so most often resistance is both disguised and misguiding. Accepting a patient’s verbalized fears, desires, and intents at face value can result in the therapist adopting the wrong treatment approach and inadvertently strong-arming the resistance. Much of what passes for resistance is nothing more than a misunderstanding in which the patient and the therapist are working on incongruent tasks. The psychotherapist must approach the resistance obliquely, using the patient’s resistance as momentum to turn the patient around slowly. Called psychojudo (N. Cummings, 2006), disarming the resistance requires skillful use of such techniques as prescribing, humoring, even ignoring the treatment. To do this, the psychotherapist must understand the operational diagnosis and the implicit contract, which respectively reveal why the patient is here now, and what the patient expects to derive from treatment.

Keywords: patient’s resistance; psychojudo; operational diagnosis; implicit contract (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A11 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 10 pages
Date: 2011-06-17
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