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About the book:
In this book, Steven H. Cooper expands on his thinking of psychoanalysis as a form of play and the implications of this for theory and clinical practice.
The most important activities of the analyst as a usable object for the patient have to do with finding the patient’s creative elements of self. Cooper illuminates this process of finding within both patient and analyst. He illuminates how play processes occur in relation to such concepts as defense, temporality, and neutrality within the analytic situation. Along the way, he theorizes a complex but usable clinical relationship between becoming and knowing in psychoanalytic work.
With rich clinical vignettes and a fresh take on the nature and practice of psychoanalysis, this book is key reading for all psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists.
About the author:
Steven H. Cooper, PhD, is a Training and Supervising Analyst at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute and the Columbia Center for Psychoanalysis. He is a Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Columbia University. In the Fall of 2025, he was the Visiting Erik Erikson Senior Clinical Scholar at the Austen Riggs Center. He is Chief Editor Emeritus of Psychoanalytic Dialogues. Dr Cooper is the author or editor of eight books in psychoanalysis, including three recent books, Playing and Becoming in Psychoanalysis published in 2023, Psychoanalysis in Play: Expanding Psychoanalytic Concepts from a Play Perspective in 2025, and with Christopher Lovett, Winnicott’s Letter to Bion: Playing, Dreaming, and Beyond all published by Routledge. He is the recipient of this year’s best paper prize of The Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, a prize he also won in 1988. He is in private practice in New York.
