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“This is a book about transitions in clinical work” states Steven Cooper in the introduction to A Disturbance in the Field (p. 1). Challenging as a book on transitions might be, this purported goal is modest given what seems to me the purview of this book: the complexity of the analytic process as it unfolds within the matrix of the analyst-patient relationship, and this from the perspective of the experience, conscious and unconscious, of both analyst and patient. Although neither a technical manual nor a theoretical treatise, the book deals with technique and theory as inextricably intertwined; all analysts, Cooper asserts, are subject to theoretical influences even when they deny adhering to a particular theory.
The theories that Cooper himself considers most useful are relational theory and contemporary Kleinian theory. Relational psychoanalysis, originally formulated by Greenberg and Mitchell (1983) as a bridge between the traditions of interpersonal relations and object relations, has come to include tributaries such as self psychology, infancy research, and contemporary Freudian and Kleinian thought. Cooper refers to relational theory as “a guiding set of principles” (p. 14), rather than a theory of technique, a metatheory of sorts that has been integrated into all theoretical orientations.
“What I continue to feel after 30 years of being a psychoanalyst,” Cooper tells us, “is that there are two major frontiers that are equally important in understanding analytic process: One is unconscious conflict and fantasy, and the other is interpersonal experience and interaction” (p. 2). In this collection of essays, he attempts to illustrate the ways in which he integrates the intrapsychic and the interpersonal within his