Foreword

Psychoanalysis has changed. The process of change in this discipline, however, has been an intensely personal one. Behind the shifts in theories, techniques, and application are individuals whose sense of identity and ways of viewing the world have profoundly altered. Relatively few individuals created the social environment within which innovation and these personal transformations became possible. There were only a handful, and Arnold Cooper is perhaps the foremost amongst them. As a professional leader, a mentor, and a friend to the contributors of this volume, he has created a context where change became possible, where new ideas could be safely thought about, where suggestions for productive and sensible modification to widely held preconceptions could be sympathetically considered. Robert Michels describes this career, in the Introduction to this book, and summarises with his usual integrative flair Arnold Cooper's remarkable contribution to the changes we have witnessed.

The main part of the volume is divided into four sections. In the first section, many of those most active in this change process provide a personal narrative of how the “global warming” of psychoanalysis (to use the phrase quoted by Compton) took place over the last thirty years. As one might expect, these participant observers of the change process tell somewhat