In this book, Steven H. Cooper expands on his thinking of psychoanalysis as a form of play, and the implications of this for theory and clinical practice.
The most important activities of the analyst as a usable object for the patient have to do with finding the patients creative elements of self. He illuminates this process of finding within both patient and analyst. Cooper illuminates how play processes occur in relation to such concepts as defense, temporality, and neutrality within the analytic situation. Along the way, he theorizes a complex, but usable clinical relationship between becoming and knowing in psychoanalytic work.
With rich clinical vignettes and a fresh take on the nature and practice of psychoanalysis this book is key reading for all psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists.
In this book, Steven H. Cooper expands on his thinking of psychoanalysis as a form of play, and the implications of this for theory and clinical practice.
1. Living an Experience of Defense: Exploring Defensive Process within
the Play Framework
2. The Activity of Neutrality
3. Playing, Paradox, and
Analytic Activity between Knowing and Being
4. Winnicotts Paradox of Being
with and without Memory and Desire: Notes on a Letter from Winnicott to Bion
5. Play and Temporality in Psychoanalysis: A Close Reading of Playing,
Creativity, and the Search for the Self in Winnicotts Playing and Reality
6. Playing in Time: Some Reflections on Temporality in the Analytic Setting
7. The Virtual Oedipal Citadel: Varieties of Isolation, Oedipal Conflict, and
Cover-Up
8. Being Careful in Only a Perverse Way: The Use of Aesthetic
Experience in Psychoanalytic Work
Steven H. Cooper is a Training and Supervising Analyst at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, and the Columbia Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research, where he is also Clinical Professor of Psychiatry. He has authored five books and coedited two others. He is in practice in New York City.
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