Objects of Hope: Exploring Possibility and Limit in Psychoanalysis

by Cooper; Steven H.

• ISBN13: 9780881632712
• ISBN10: 0881632716
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2000-08-01
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

Despite the importance of the concept of hope in human affairs, psychoanalysts have long had difficulty accepting responsibility for the manner in which their various interpretive orientations and explanations of therapeutic action express their own hopes for their patients. In Objects of Hope: Exploring Possibility and Limit in Psychoanalysis, Steven Cooper remedies this longstanding lacuna in the literature, and, in the process, provides a thorough comparative analysis of contemporary psychoanalytic models with respect to issues of hope and hopefulness. Cooper's task is challenging, given that the most hopeful aspects of human growth frequently entail acceptance of the destructive elements of our inner lives. The analysis of hope, then, implicates what Cooper sees as a central dialectic tension in psychoanalysis: that between psychic possibility and psychic limit. He argues that analysts have historically had difficulty integrating the concept of limit into a treatment modality so dedicated to the creation and augmentation of psychic possibility. And yet, it is only by accepting the realm of limit as a necessary counterpoise to the realm of possibility and clinically embracing the tension between the two realms that analysts can further their understanding of therapeutic process in the interest of better treatment outcomes. Cooper persuasively demonstrates how each psychoanalytic theory provides its own logic of hope; this logic, in turn, translates into a distinctive sense of what the analyst may hope for the patient, and what the patient is encouraged to hope for himself or herself. Objects of Hope brings ranging scholarship and refreshing candor to bear on the knotty issue of what can and cannot be achieved in the course of psychoanalytic therapy. It will be valued not only as an exemplary exercise in comparative psychoanalysis, but also as a thoughtful, original effort to place the vital issue of hope at the center of clinical concern.

Author Biography

Steven H. Cooper, Ph.D. is a training and supervising analyst at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, a faculty member and supervising analyst at the Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis, and Clinical Associate Professor of Psychology at Beth Israel Hospital, Harvard Medical School.

Table of Contents

Preface	ix
Acknowledgments	xxvii
Objects of Hope	1	(34)
PART I INTIMACY AND SOLITUDE	35	(84)
Intimacy and Solitude	41	(34)
Old and New Objects in Fairbairnian and American Relational Theory	75	(24)
Mutual Containment in the Analytic Situation	99	(20)
PART II THE SHIFTING SURFACE	119	(98)
Regression and the Old-New Object Continuum: Molly and the Problem of ``Antiregression'' and Progression	125	(26)
In Loewald's Shadow: Interpretation and the Psychic Future	151	(22)
Countertransference Expressiveness and American Ego Psychology: A Clinical Comparative Perspective	173	(24)
The Analyst's Construction of Psychic Possibility	197	(20)
PART III THE CONSPIRATORIAL TIMELESS UNCONSCIOUS	217	(74)
The Conspiratorial Timeless Unconscious: A Comparative Approach to the Problem of Limits in the Psychoanalytic Process	219	(42)
Concluding Remarks on the Logic of Hope: The Analyst's Concealed and Revealed Hopes in Psychoanalytic Theory	261	(30)
References	291	(18)
Index	309