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The weapons of controversy require little application when confronted by the selected papers of Arnold M. Cooper. This collection, edited by Elizabeth L. Auchincloss, who provides an excellent introduction, is one of a series of publications of the New Library of Psychoanalysis, a new version of the International Psychoanalytical Library associated with the Institute of Psychoanalysis, London. This series of more than fifty publications presents the writings of many of the most prominent British and Continental psychoanalysts. The Quiet Revolution in American Psychoanalysis is unique in that it speaks from an American point of view
The work of Cooper, once considered to be that of a maverick, would today be considered by many, including me, to be solidly in the mainstream. Trained at the Columbia institute and markedly influenced by the culturalist and adaptational point of view, Cooper today speaks with a voice that American psychoanalysts find quite reasonable. His thought is deeply wedded to praxis; theoretical preoccupations unrelated to technique he finds trivial, as he considers analysis to be fundamentally a clinical transaction. His American pragmatism brings with it a freedom from doctrine, from metapsychology for its own sake, and an unwillingness to subscribe to authority in the face of the clinical fact. Cooper favors an open and generally pluralist position, although he would be the first to acknowledge that some ideas are better than others.
The clinical immersion he emphasizes leads to a position with which it is easy to resonate. Cooper's work questions the centrality of the “classically” defined oedipus complex as the nuclear dynamic in both personality development and therapeutic work. He doubts the current usefulness of the libido theory and the psychoeconomic point of