Vol. 17 (2026): Linguistic manifestation of resistance in psychodynamic psychotherapy and its communicative treatment (Carolina Fenner)

Framing paper of the cumulative dissertation for the award of the academic degree of Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Mannheim, 2025

Resistance is a central concept in psychodynamic psychotherapy, though it is not an easily identifiable phenomenon, as it can manifest itself in many different ways. The challenge for therapists is therefore to recognize resistance and, if necessary, to address or work on it in order to achieve progress in therapy. To enable therapists to recognize resistance, it is helpful to know the possible linguistic and interactional characteristics of resistance phenomena. This raises the question of how (potential) resistance phenomena manifest themselves in psychotherapeutic interaction. The present dissertation – which consists of this framing paper and four articles – addresses this question by reviewing previous research and using conversation analysis (CA) empirically examine interactional and linguistic phenomena that may manifest resistance in talk-in-interaction (verbosity, claims of not-knowing and silence). CA is a well-established method for analyzing psychotherapeutic interaction. However, beyond examining individual resistance phenomena, the dissertation also includes a longitudinal CA study to show how resistance can change on the interactional surface over the course of a therapeutic treatment.
The data, on which the four studies are based and which are reflected in this framing paper, consist of videotaped outpatient psychotherapy sessions in German from different patients and therapists. They were drawn from a large collection of videotaped data from a training institute for psychodynamic psychotherapy.
A key finding is that the investigated phenomena are rarely treated as resistance. Neither patients nor therapists make explicit attributions of resistance, but at most implicit ones. Moreover, the phenomena often also have other functions, such as patients indexing difficulties with the ongoing task or topic.
The findings offered in this thesis have clear implications for conversation analysts, psychologists, and practicing psychotherapists alike, such as how to recognize resistance in psychotherapeutic interactions on the linguistic-interactional level. Additionally, it offers a detailed discussion of the concept of resistance.