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While psychoanalysis is often presented to the educated public as a single entity that is both a theory of the mind and an approach to treatment, a kind of highly specialized unique form of psychotherapy, those who are involved in its practice are painfully aware of its increasingly fragmented nature. Psychoanalytic theory has been a veritable growth industry with the result that multiple competing schools of psychoanalysis exist, usually with overt insistence upon the superiority of their theoretical orientation and clinical approach. Furthermore, different theoretical approaches are frequently based on assumptions about mental development and the nature of emotional illness that are quite incompatible with each other.
In light of this situation and the history of schisms and conflicts over theory, Steven Cooper's book, A Disturbance in the Field: Essays in Transierence-Counter-transference Engagement, distinguishes itself as the work of a psychoanalyst who is dedicated to conducting psychoanalysis while maintaining an allegiance to what appears to be all the psychoanalytic theories that he has embraced in the course of his career in psychoanalysis. Of particular interest to this reviewer is Cooper's own account of which theories have been most central to his present thinking. He frankly acknowledges that his predominant influences have come from two primary theoretical positions, namely the Relational School and the Contemporary Kleinians of London (p. 3). These two theoretical schools that strike me as fundamentally incompatible approaches to analysis are, for Cooper, not only compatible but also essentially intertwined and crucial to his practice of psychoanalysis. Because his credentials as a relational psychoanalyst are well known through his position as one of the joint chief editors of Psychoanalytic Dialogues, it comes as a surprise to find his theoretical position so intensely saturated with contemporary Kleinian positions. His focus, for the most part, see