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I like some of the changes that were added to the 7e psyker phase. The usage of WC to manifest powers adds a resource management aspect that previous there, and gives diminishing returns on massed Psykers.

On the other hand, the other player's only involvement is in choosing to attempt to deny, and thats mostly it.

The idea proposed is to allow a new category of Psyker Powers: Abjurations.

An Abjuration is a spell which is cast during the enemy Psyker Phase, in response to some triggered action. An Abjuration can be any of the other types of Power (Blessing, Malediction, Witchfire, Nova, Beam).

Example: Twisted Intent is a Malediction cast as an Abjuration in response to an enemy casting a Blessing which provides a Characteristic Bonus. Twisted Intent has a WC cost of 1+the enemy psyker's previous successes. If successful, the stat bonus is instead treated as a stat malus (ex: Hammerhand gives -2 Strength, etc).

Other thoughts include Reflecting/deflecting Witchfires/Maledictions, a discounted Summoning/malediction triggering on the Psyker's Death, forcing an enemy psyker to test for Perils on 3d6, etc. In short, dirty tricks.

Of course, such powers would be mostly pointless if your opponent didn't bring Psykers. Optionally, the ability for Allies to trigger Abjurations would lead to...interesting game interactions/potential breaker combos.

Is the idea worth refining and working on?

It's a neat idea, but it would be too easy to abuse. If your army has a few mastery levels, you can fairly easily cripple the most important buffs of your enemy. For most armies these days, psychic powers are all about getting the important ones off while treating your less important powers as a nice bonus. This means that your oponent will often hae one power that is obviously more important to them than others, and you can easily focus on messing with that power.

You could, for instance, easily shut down that enemy hammer hand that they were counting on going off so that they could deal with an MC or mess with the farseer's doom power that his banshee friends were depending on for their damage output. It makes it really easy to shut down your opponent's psychic phase, and having blessings turn to maledictions or what have you just makes it worse. Plus, if you're running a psyker heavy amy, you'll have plenty of nasty tricks you can do in your own psychic phase, so unless your opponent also has abjuration, you've essentially hoarded one phase of the game for yourself.

This isn't as bad against armies with lots of psykers, especially redundant psykers, but your average marine or even non-psychic-spamming eldar list will be punished pretty hard.

And "abjuration isn't useful if your opponent doesn't bring psykers," doesn't help balance it out because you simply won't take abjuration powers if you know your opponent is playing, say, Tau. You could integrade abjurations into other psychic power tables, but in addition to being messy, that will just make people go, "Oh, I rolled abjuration but don't need it. Guess I'lls wap that for a primaris and grab something off this other table too since I wasn't going to use that power anyway."