Introduction to "Changing Ideas In A Changing World: The Revolution in Psychoanalysis"

Arnold Cooper was born in New Jersey on March 9, 1923. He attended Columbia College, from which he graduated in 1943 and where his love of literature, great books, and great thinking began. He wrote that when he first read Freud, “I experienced a sense of instant revelation into myself … my friends … my world of politics and literature. … Things seemed clearer. … I asked a friend what one had to do to become a psychoanalyst … I had never thought of going to medical school” (1998, p. 2). He attended the University of Utah School of Medicine (only to discover that they had no Department of Psychiatry!), and received his M.D. there in 1947. He then spent a year as a fellow at Harvard and Boston City Hospital's Thorndike Memorial Laboratory, beginning a commitment to research that was to continue throughout his career. By the time he had finished his medical internship at Presbyterian Hospital in New York, he had published five papers, three in the prestigious Journal of Clinical Investigation. They described studies of urinary amino acids in Wilson's Disease and the treatment of cirrhosis of the liver (Cooper, Eckhardt, Faloon, & Davidson, 1950; Faloon, Eckhardt, Cooper, & Davidson, 1949a; Faloon, Eckhardt, Davidson, Murphy, & Cooper, 1949b).

During his research fellowship he had his first experience in psychoanalysis, with a recent graduate of the Boston Institute. It lasted for eight months, and years later he recalled it as extraordinarily painful: “Each session was excruciating. I found myself tongue-tied and he was entirely silent” (1998, p. 3). The following year, during his internship, he entered