Steven Cooper begins his new project of comparing analytic persuasions—the American relational and ego-psychological, the British object relations and the contemporary Kleinian—by making an obvious but often overlooked observation: that “psychoanalysis has a passion for the possible.” This statement captures well Cooper's approach to the problems created by analysts' reluctance to acknowledge their hopes and wishes for their patients in clinical work, and the limitations of psychoanalysis in helping their patients transform their lives.

Cooper's most cogent exploration of the role of hope and limitation in psychoanalysis comes in the final two chapters of his book. In the last chapter, he discusses how theory functions as a logic of hope, providing a containing function for analysts as they cope with the frustrations of the unexplainable and the intractable aspects of their patients. However, his more compelling critical contribution in this chapter looks at the way many of our theories explain the analyst's influence