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Steven H. Cooper's Playing and Becoming in Psychoanalysis is filled with both illuminating and challenging moments. The engaging parts draw on rich clinical material and are both enjoyable and insightful, whereas the theoretical explorations can feel densely integrated in their complexity. But before delving deeper into these impressions, let me first take a step back and offer a brief overview of the book's nature and scope.
Cooper's book is an impassioned examination and homage to play in the clinical setting. After declaring his desire to expatiate on Winnicott's psychoanalytic theories of play, Cooper addresses several issues at the heart of this quest in the introduction. His goals include (pp. 5–10): Expanding on the use of Winnicott's theory of play between patient and clinician in the transference/countertransference relationship and in the enactments, it produces; exploring the refractory elements of internalized bad objects and the use of play to mitigate change; and helping patients with a more concretized internal world develop a capacity for metaphor through play.
Cooper also poses the following questions: How do we reach seemingly unreachable patients? How are we used by our patients who have no experience of the usefulness of the other? How do we facilitate an environment to play when there is a lack; How do we translate experience into meaning? How do we survive repetition and deadness in the dyad? How do we facilitate mourning? How does a clinician develop an ethics of play? What are the limits of play? How do we understand love as a promoter for growth and being?
Additionally, Cooper explores how we, as analysts, both change and struggle to change as subjects; he invites an exploration of knowing and being emerging in different parts of the analytic process and examines Stephen Mitchell's develop-mental tilt theory (Mitchell, 1984) and criticizes Mitchell for missing Winnicott's focus points of play between patient and clinician. The 10-page introduct