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Steven Cooper is among our very finest contributors to the literature on clinical psychoanalysis. This book of essays, many of which were published previously in somewhat different form, continues the high standard he has set in his earlier work.
While filled with thoughtful ideas, case descriptions and creative syntheses of disparate theoretical concepts, what is most impressive about these papers is the open and non-proprietary sensibility that marks every page and every sentence. When Cooper writes about his ideas, he is quick to include other psychoanalytic thinkers whose writings have influenced him. He does not get hung up on terms and names and in this sense is a ‘lumper’, not a ‘splitter’. While open-minded, Cooper is also rigorous. He is tough when he has to be -in how he thinks, what he writes and how he participates in his own clinical work. His ideas are drawn from a focus on unconscious conflict and fantasy (conflict theory a la Brenner and neo-Kleinian concepts), set against the background of American relational psychoanalysis (interpersonal experience and interaction). These conceptual offerings are anything but abstractions: