The quiet revolution in American psychoanalysis: Selected papers of Arnold M. Cooper Edited by Elizabeth L. Auchincloss New York:  Routledge (New Library of Psychoanalysis series). 2005  277 p.

Arnold Cooper has been a major contributor and supporter of the substantial changes in psychoanalysis by others in the past 25 years. He has also been instrumental in teaching and in encouraging new ideas. He has in some ways identified with the ‘outsider’, both in his personal history, and with the Columbia Psychoanalytic Institute as a splinter group originally created with an ideal of reforming psychoanalytic ideas. Although hardly an outsider in the current psychoanalytic scene, this perspective potentially offers him a basis for originality. He has advocated maintaining connections to the wider scientific and academic world, as well as the importance of research. He has been influential in integrating psychoanalytic concepts with psychiatry, in research, teaching and writing and has been active in international psychoanalysis.

This book brings together a number of papers in which Cooper proposes and develops his ideas. If there is a single thread, it is the author's openness to new ways of understanding psychoanalysis and taking a creative look at different theoretical concepts, terms and categories. Many of the ideas Cooper expressed have been subsequently studied and elaborated by others, so they have had a wide influence. He examines established ideas with a respectful but critical approach, assessing their current appropriateness, and puts all the debates he addresses and concepts he discusses into historical and theoretical context. The papers in this book were primarily published in the 1980s and early 1990s. Several notable ideas and formulations stand out. Cooper is among those currently questioning the validity and usefulness of the concept of ‘transference neurosis’. He presents the novel idea that castration anxiety is a façade for deeper and earlier conflicts about passivity, and he develops and elaborates the concept of the narcissistic-masochistic character, arguing for the ‘power of the weak’ as a masochistic seduction of the powerful.

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