The Analyst's Experience of The Depressive Position

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:56 29 November 2016
The Analyst’s Experience of the

Depressive Position
In The Analyst’s Experience of the Depressive Position: The melancholic

errand of psychoanalysis, Steven Cooper explores a subject matter previously
applied more exclusively to patients, but less frequently to psychoanalysts.
Cooper probes the analyst’s experience of the depressive position in the analytic
situation. These experiences include the pleasures and warmth of helping
patients to bear what appears unbearable, as well as the poignant experiences
of limitation, incompleteness, repetition and disappointment as a vital part of
clinical work. He describes a seam in clinical work in which the analyst is
always trying to find and re-find a position from which he can help patients to
work with these experiences.
The Analyst’s Experience of the Depressive Position includes an exploration
of the analyst’s participation and resistance to helping patients hold some of the
most unsettling parts of their experience. Cooper draws some analogies
between elements of theory about aesthetic experience in terms of how we bear
new and old experience. He provides an examination of the patient as an artist
of sorts and the analyst as a form of psychic boundary artist. Just as the crea-
tive act of art involves the capacity to transform pain and ruin into the
depressive position, so does the co-creation of how we understand the patient’s
mind through the mind of the analyst.
The Analyst’s Experience of the Depressive Position explores a rich, provo-
cative and long overdue topic relevant to psychoanalysts, psycho-dynamically
oriented psychotherapists, as well as students and teachers of both psycho-
analysis and psychodynamic psychotherapy.
Steven H. Cooper is a psychoanalyst and teacher well known internationally for

his interest in integrating independent, Kleinian and relational thinking in his
clinical work and writing. A training and supervising analyst at the Boston
Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, he is also Associate Professor in Psychiatry
at Harvard Medical School and Co-Chief Editor Emeritus at Psychoanalytic
Dialogues.
This page intentionally left blank

The Analyst’s Experience of the
Depressive Position
The melancholic errand of psychoanalysis
Steven H. Cooper
Add Add
Add Add
AddAddAdd
AddAdd Add
Add
First published 2016
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2016 Steven H. Cooper
The right of Steven H. Cooper to be identified as author of this work has been
asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the
publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered
trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent
to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Names: Cooper, Steven H., 1951- , author.
Title: The analyst’s experience of the depressive position : the melancholic
errand of psychoanalysis / Steven H. Cooper.
Description: London ; New York : Routledge, 2016. | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015032541| ISBN 9781138844100 (hardback) | ISBN
9781138844131 (pbk.) | ISBN 9781315730615 (ebook)
Subjects: | MESH: Countertransference (Psychology) | Depression--psychology. |
Professional-Patient Relations. | Psychoanalytic Therapy. | Unconscious
(Psychology)
Classification: LCC RC537 | NLM WM 62 | DDC 616.85/270651--dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015032541
ISBN: 978-1-138-84410-0 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-138-84413-1 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-73061-5 (ebk)
Typeset in Sabon
by Taylor & Francis Books
Dedication: To Abraham and Leon

This page intentionally left blank

Contents
Acknowledgments viii
Introduction 1
1 Ruin and beauty I: Some basic assumptions and models of the
analyst’s relationship to the depressive position 13
2 Ruin and beauty II: The analyst’s experience and resistance to grief
and sense of limitation in the analytic process 29
3 The melancholic errand of psychoanalysis: Exploring the analyst’s
“good enough” experiences of repetition 46
4 Exploring a patient’s shift from relative silence to verbal
expressiveness: Observations on an element of the analyst’s
participation 61
5 The analyst’s object relationship to the psychoanalytic process 82
6 The things we carry: Finding/creating the object and the analyst’s
self-reflective participation 97
7 Revisiting the analyst as old and new object: The analyst’s failures
and the therapeutic action of psychoanalysis 116
8 Reflections on the aesthetics of the psychic boundary concept:
Uses and misuses 134
9 The theorist as an unconscious participant: Emerging and
unintended crossings in a post-pluralistic psychoanalysis 148
Index 170
Acknowledgments
I thank Kate Hawes for accepting my proposal to publish this book and the
help that I received from a variety of editors at Routledge, including Susan
Wickendon and Kirsten Buchanen. Additionally, both Kristopher Spring and
Clea Simon were very helpful editors in various stages of writing.
I am very grateful to several people who read and helped me with drafts of
chapters in this book. Each in their own ways made valuable contributions to
my thinking and writing. Christopher Lovett read and provided many
thoughtful reactions to Chapter 9. Ken Corbett, Adrienne Harris and Stephen
Seligman read and critiqued Chapter 6. More than that, we have had great
conversations over the years about psychoanalytic theory and clinical psycho-
analysis. Lucy LaFarge, a gifted editor, made extremely useful editorial com-
ments on Chapter 7 when it was written earlier as a paper. Lucy LaFarge and
Rick Zimmer provided helpful editorial comments and ways of thinking about
earlier drafts of Chapter 9. Charles Levin made numerous and invaluable con-
tributions to Chapter 8. He helped me to develop my thinking about the nature
of what we mean by boundaries in clinical work.
In the later stages of writing this book, I had some very meaningful and
enjoyable conversations with my colleague Jonathan Palmer about art, psycho-
analysis and the nature of the analyst’s relationship to the depressive position in
clinical work.
I want to thank so many of my patients, those whom I have helped and those
whom I wished I’d been able to help more. Finally, I appreciate the many con-
versations that I am able to have with students at Cambridge Health Alliance,
Harvard Medical School, The Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute and
the Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis.
Most of all I thank my wife, Jennifer Ellwood, and my sons, Ben and Daniel
Cooper. I am happy that one of Jennifer’s oil paintings, “New Marlborough,
#1” is the cover for the paperback and eBook editions of this book. This book
is dedicated to my grandfather Abraham and my father, Leon.
Introduction
Psychoanalysis is always an incomplete process. What we help patients to

understand is held in the melancholic embrace of incompleteness and limitation.
I begin with the notion that part of the art of psychoanalysis involves working
in the shadow of incompleteness and this is where we find something useful and
often gratifying to offer our patients. Psychoanalysis embodies and enacts
incompleteness because a patient who has experienced a good enough analysis
understands that the process is limited by the analyst’s and patient’s ability to
understand the patient’s mind. Put another way, psychoanalyses are conducted
by human beings.
I recently read some words from Michael Parsons about his own experience
of doing analysis at a point in his career when he is appreciating that it will not
go on forever. It moved me and when I read it, I realized that in writing this
book I am trying to come to terms with some of the feelings and ideas that he
alludes to here:
I have been sitting behind the couch for 25 years, so I am fairly well along
in my working life as an analyst. This patient gives me a sense of how
much that is fascinating there is yet for me to discover about psycho-
analysis, and how far my analytic capacities have still to develop. I find
myself thinking, “If I had another 25 years, where might I get to then, in
understanding all this?!” But I am not going to have another 25 years. So
this analysis faces me with recognizing how much I shall never understand
about psychoanalysis. It is not required counter-transferentially, to keep
this particular analysis on track, that I should contemplate my inescapable
losses, failures and, finally, my death. Accepting these and finding a capa-
city to face them is a necessary psychic function for all human beings. But
Mr. W’s analysis does make me more conscious of the need to discover this
capacity in myself.
To be sure, for some patients the ways in which incompleteness or limitation is

a part of analysis overlaps with earlier experiences of parental or self-limitation.
2 Introduction
Some patients rail against limitation because it echoes earlier deprivation

or disappointment. Some patients seek analysis not to work through limitation
but to redress it and end up being disappointed that the opportunity
for working through, while extraordinary, is far different from what they’d
wished for.
There is sometimes, I would say often, an enormous warmth and intimacy
generated through the patient’s and analyst’s efforts at understanding the
patient’s inner world just as there is also solitude for each. The notion that
patient and analyst will try to see if the unbearable might be bearable is often
comforting. It may also provoke feelings of sexual excitement, or the potential
despair or abandonment stimulated by the patient fearing that somehow bear-
ing pain might mean that the pain will be minimized in the mind of the analyst.
As patients enter more and more deeply into analysis, they become more inter-
ested and aware of their analyst’s mind and often particularly the analyst’s
resistance to bearing the patient’s psychic pain. They probe our capacities and
willingness to take on, contain and understand what they have internalized and
in one way or other they are also probing our resistances to doing so.
It is interesting that one of the best reasons for having an analysis as an
analyst not only involves working through conflicts, but also in experiencing
not working through conflicts. In other words, good analysis allows us to hold
unsettling narratives. Life will always be intermittently out of joint, even for the
most psychologically privileged among us. Analysts need to learn how to hold
their patients’ and their own sense of limit, grief, incompleteness and dis-
appointment in analytic work. As an analyst, while I believe consciously that
everything that I offer is incomplete, a great deal of my internal work occurs in
the countertransference struggle with disappointment, incompleteness, and
particularly in bearing repetition. And while many analysts such as Rosenfeld
(1987) and Schafer (2003) have emphasized the analyst’s capacity to bear repe-
tition without blaming one’s self as analyst or her patient, this is easier said
than done.
The analyst’s sense of disappointment and limitation often reflects realistic
assessments of dyadic and existential limitation for integration at any juncture
of analytic work. An important function of psychoanalysis relates to how it
provides the patient a playground for the transformation of desire, anxiety,
sadness and anger into a kind of good enough disappointment and incomplete-
ness. Sometimes, the analyst’s experiences of disappointment relate to his
accurate read on these existential limitations; sometimes, his or her difficulty
bearing disappointment relates to unconsciously grandiose or inhibited expec-
tations. Both unconsciously grandiose and inhibited expectations may serve to
titrate his or her anxiety about both incompleteness and the risks of knowing
about and analyzing transference. At still other times, his capacity to bear dis-
appointment relates to a repository of regret or sadness about either his own
limitations as an analyst and in his own analysis, or as an analyst in his work
with patients.
Introduction 3
It is a curious matter that we have long been focused on the importance for
our patients of developing their capacity to mourn and to accept conflict and
incompleteness in the analytic process—hallmarks of the depressive position—
yet we have had relatively less to say explicitly in ongoing analyses (apart from
termination) about the analyst’s experience of these capacities in the analytic
situation. How we experience and work with our own sense of incompleteness,
our own grief, during the analytic process is deeply influential in helping our
patients.
I say that we have had less to say “explicitly” about the analyst’s experience
of the depressive position and his resistance to it because in many ways, there is
a great deal of writing in the area of countertransference that indirectly relates
to this problem. Our limitations in containing patients’ affect, our difficulties
working with projective identification, and our struggles with strong erotic and
aggressive transference all involve the analyst’s perils in maintaining a self-
reflective position. Most of this writing, though, is framed in the context of
psychoanalytic technique and less explicitly about the analyst’s relationship to
the depressive position.
I have never been very fond of the term “depressive position” but I have also
had a hard time coming up with something better, something more descriptive.
Winnicott (1954, p264) put it well when he said that:
The term “depressive position” is a bad name for a normal process, but no
one has been able to find a better. My own suggestion was that it should be
called “the Stage of Concern.” I believe this term easily introduces the
concept. Melanie Klein includes the word “concern” in her own descrip-
tions. However, this descriptive term does not cover the whole of the con-
cept. I fear the original term will remain.
At its best, the term includes our capacities to accept limitation and incomple-
teness, to grieve loss, and to accept responsibility. With regard to the analyst’s
relationship to the depressive position, he or she must have the self-reflective
capacity for concern about his patients and his work, his participation. He must
work with the understanding that resistance to this position is ongoing. In other
words, he “concerns” himself with these matters of resistance as a part of
ongoing work. There is always a “disturbance in the field” (Cooper, 2010)
because psychoanalysis is by definition a “contentious topic” (Parsons, 2006,
p1183).
There are at least a few possible reasons for our profession not being more
explicit about the analyst’s relationship to the depressive position. I have won-
dered if there is an important dynamic operating in the history of technique, a
kind of resistance to our experience of the depressive position in which we to
some extent disavow the necessary repetition in psychoanalysis that contributes
to it being a relatively slow process. The patience required in our work and the
ongoing limits to our understanding require that we constantly work toward a
4 Introduction
paradoxically lofty and modest analytic ego ideal, best described by Samuel
Beckett’s (1984) notion of trying in an ongoing way, to “fail better.”
One element of intrinsic incompleteness has something of a quality for the
analyst of “can’t win” in terms of the difficulties of roles as both facilitating
expressiveness and allowing for the patient to feel us as an internal object
within the transference. We are often nearly always occupying more than one
room in the patient’s mind as internal object and facilitator.
I believe that we as psychoanalysts and psycho-dynamically oriented psy-
chotherapists have undergone an important shift in how we think about the

types of change that analysis can provide. In some ways, the earliest days of
psychoanalysis were abuzz with this radically new and creative therapy. In post-
World War II America’s wild enthusiasm for psychoanalysis, we developed
overly idealistic ideas about what progress was possible and underplayed how
we actually help, trying to fit in with conventional versions of symptom reduc-
tion and change. In a sense then we are realizing more about our profession’s
relationship to the depressive position.
Psychoanalysis helps people to hold affective and ideational experience. This
is a monumental achievement and sometimes, though not always, also results in
symptomatic relief. Psychoanalysis helps people with the ways in which they
falter and fall down in their psychological capacities to bear experience, to
enjoy their inner lives, and to enjoy their relationships with others. In short,
psychoanalysis helps people to work toward and with the depressive position
over the course of their life. This book tries to explore elements of the incom-
pleteness of psychoanalysis from the analyst’s point of view. It focuses on these
matters in analyses that are regarded, at least to some degree, as useful and
productive by patient and analyst, not so-called failed cases.
In writing this book, I begin a more systematic examination of how the
depressive position enters into the mind and heart of the analyst. Stepping back
and thinking about developments in psychoanalytic theory over the last 60
years, beginning with the work of Racker (1952), it might be said that psycho-
analysis has been integrating the mind of the analyst as an essential tool in
understanding our patient’s mind. In a sense, we have been writing about the
notion that the analyst is trying to work in the depressive position but is often
working back and forth between the depressive and the paranoid position in
ways that are related to both the communications and projections of his patient
and the analyst’s capacities for bearing affect and achieving understanding.
The book takes as a basic observation that doing analysis involves a constant
struggle to listen to and understand what patients are communicating about
regarding their inner lives. Seamus Heaney (2012), in writing about the techni-
que of poetry in a piece titled “Preoccupations,” stated that “Technique
involves the discovery of ways to go out of [the poet’s] normal cognitive bounds
and raid the inarticulate” (p7). To learn about unconscious meaning and to
integrate affect is always difficult and involves raiding inaccessible and inchoate
parts of the self (Parsons, 2007). To the extent that we are invited and not
Introduction 5
invited to know these parts of our patients, psychoanalysis often involves a

disturbance in the analyst and a disturbance in the field. As many analysts have
demonstrated in their examples of countertransference participation (e.g.,
Cooper, 1998, 2000a; Feldman, 1997; Joseph, 1985; Parsons, 2006, 2007; Smith,
2000, 2003), all listening is accompanied by conflict.
In this book, I have tried to take on elements of how and when I have been
able to work successfully, how and when I have not, and what I was able to
understand about the clinical process of getting back to and resuming what I
regard as relatively better work. Lest it be in any way unclear, it is considerably

more difficult to be a patient than an analyst. While I am focused on elements
of the analyst’s experience and relationship to the patient’s internal objects and
his obstacles to doing analysis, there is little question that the patient has the
far more difficult row to hoe.
Kleinian theory, the Independent tradition, and American relational theory
have influenced my clinical thinking, and it is worth orienting the reader to how
these influences may be seen in what follows. I have found the contributions of
many contemporary Kleinians indispensable to understanding the patient’s
internalized object representational world and unconscious fantasy. I try to
understand how the patient is not only projecting particular kinds of uncon-
scious internalized object relationships onto the analytic situation, but also
trying to reduce the differences between the experiences of the analyst and the
patient’s internalized phantasies (e.g., Feldman, 1997; O’Shaughnessy, 1992). I
have also been influenced by Stephen Mitchell (e.g., Mitchell, 1991) and Philip
Bromberg (1995), who have explored the importance of self-reflection regarding
the analyst’s participation in understanding both the patient’s internalized
representational world and the analyst’s potential impact on the patient’s asso-
ciations and progress.
These traditions don’t make for an easy melding. In my own thinking, how-
ever, they each illuminate the importance of internalized representations and
interaction as avenues for elaborating both the patient’s internal object world
and the patient’s and analyst’s resistance to understanding unconscious conflict.
In the work of Rosenfeld (1987) and especially in Michael Feldman’s work (e.g.,
Feldman, 1994, 1997, 1999), I have found a bridge between the worthwhile
emphasis on understanding the patient’s projections of an internalized object
relationship and propensities toward action that occur in enactments between
patient and analyst.
I hope that it is clear that the perspective that I try to elaborate in this book
does not fall neatly into a particular orientation or tradition, since it incorpo-
rates elements of unconscious fantasy, internalized object relations, the impor-
tance of the transference-countertransference matrix, and the analyst’s personal
participation as key concepts in clinical psychoanalysis. I believe that the Inde-
pendent tradition, Kleinian tradition and relational traditions are all important
influences in my thinking. Analysts from each of these traditions are likely to
find ways that I have emphasized parts of the clinical encounter that they both
6 Introduction
recognize and disagree with as a result of this melding of traditions. I think that
it is safe to say that I am a theoretical outlier for all of these traditions, and yet
I am deeply influenced and moved by contributions from each of these theories.
As psychoanalysis has changed regarding how we think about the notion of
success and limitation in psychoanalysis, we have been coming to terms with
our own relationship to the depressive position. The most obvious indication of
this phenomenon was the fact that we have undergone an epistemological shift
involving the analyst’s authority. Bromberg has termed psychoanalysts “artists
of uncertainty.” Earlier in my career (Cooper, 1996), I used the term inter-

pretive fallibility, and Chused and Raphling (1992) referred to the analyst’s
mistakes as inevitable and a major source of learning in the analytic process.
Levenson (1992) suggested dispensing altogether with the term mistake, and I
agree. The very success of an analysis is often viewed as related to the patient
and analyst’s capacities to integrate their limitations as human beings. Since
Racker’s (1952, p33) famous words, we have been trying to take into account
the analyst’s fallibility into our models of therapeutic action:
The first distortion of truth in the “myth of the analytic situation” is that
analysis is an interaction between a sick person and a healthy one. The truth
is that it is an interaction between two personalities … and each of these
two personalities—that of the analyst and that of the patient—responds to
every event of the analytic situation.
While Melanie Klein brilliantly charted the territory of the depressive position,
it was later analysts such as Bion, Winnicott, Isaacs and Ogden who illuminated
the ways in which our patients are often moving back and forth between the
depressive and paranoid-schizoid positions. Writing from an ego-psychological
perspective, Loewald was also able to capture the coterminous processes of
ego-developed and regressive parts of the personality.
Whether it has been articulated explicitly or not (I think more not), recent
contributions by many analysts from the Kleinian, Independent and relational
tradition suggest that we have a greater appreciation of how much the analyst
is also moving back and forth between depressive and paranoid positions. The
key for us in understanding our patients is always at some level, “where are our
patient’s anxieties?” How do we make contact with what the patient is com-
municating to us about conflicts, fantasies and affects? How are they burdened
by these affects and conflicts and unaware of how they express and avoid
understanding? How do they include us as transference objects in their inter-
nalized narratives, and what kind of responsiveness is elicited in our participa-
tion with them?
These are all questions that analysts have come to understand need to be
asked of the analyst. For patients with externalized and paranoid views of their
problems, we know that interpretations that land the focus on their internal
world are likely to incur more anxiety, more persecutory anxiety and more
Introduction 7
despair about the analytic process. The analyst is placed in the center of two
questions more often than not: “How do I talk to my patient about his anxiety
that is experienced as outside the self?” But the second question is often even
more complex and interesting: “How do I work with the fact that I will inevi-
tably say, not say, or come to represent things to my patient that will heighten
this anxiety rather than make it more palatable?”
This latter question speaks to the inevitability of the analyst’s participation
from inside the patient’s problems. The analyst must take risks, but he must
also be careful and thoughtful. Steiner (1993) provides some good examples of
his own subtle forms of retaliation toward a patient even as he is trying to
honor that the patient cannot accept “patient-centered” interpretations. It is
another kind of impingement to be so careful within the patient’s idiom for
accepting interpretation that mistakes or disruptions are avoided. Richard Die-
benkorn (1993), an abstract expressionist painter, in his “Notes to Myself on
Beginning a Painting,” comes close to describing this aspect of analytic work.
He stated as one of his ten notes: “Be careful, but only in a perverse way.” We
will sometimes increase the patient’s anxiety if we are trying to make contact,
and if we try too hard to avoid this outcome, then a different kind of damage
will result—the damage of not ever reaching the patient.
In fact, “being careful, but only in a perverse way” is an important way to
think about the enterprise of psychoanalysis. Friedman (2007), in describing
analysts as involved in the unsavory process of creating, even stoking illusions
in the setup of analysis and then helping the patient with the gradual process of
disillusionment, may be getting at the same type of understanding of being
careful in a perverse way. For we are at once helping patients to understand
their fantasies and wishes while ultimately believing that the depressive position
is our goal—that we are up to something quite radical in creating an arrange-
ment that may stoke illusions and yet holding as most valuable the capacity to
grieve some of these hopes. As analysts, we promote the patient’s ability to
learn how to hold wishes, fantasies, and desire in the settled and unsettled
landscape of any life. The analyst in his work is always struggling with the
tension between wanting the patient to develop and grow as much as possible,
and the capacity to understand the intrinsic incompleteness of his or her life. It
is indeed a melancholic errand.
Organization of the book

While this is a largely clinically oriented book, the first section of the book
involving the first two chapters reviews the concept of the depressive position
with a special emphasis on how the concept applies to the analyst’s experience
of working as an analyst. These first chapters contain only brief clinical exam-
ples and are largely intended to set the theoretical stage for the clinical direction
in the subsequent chapters.
8 Introduction
If the last 35 years of psychoanalysis tell us anything, it is that we have

documented how the analyst’s listening position is not a steady state of residing
in the depressive position. Psychoanalysis is an arduous profession, and the task
of listening, absorbing and containing strong affects, fantasies, transference and
recruitment into internalized object scenarios of our patients requires that we
are constantly observing the to and fro of our own movement from the para-
noid and depressive positions. I try to provide some theoretical scaffolding that
I hope serves to undergird the more clinical focus in the other chapters in this
volume.
In these two theoretical chapters, I also briefly explore the relationship between
aesthetic experience and experiences of disappointment in the analytic process.
The notion of the analyst as artist is a leitmotif throughout the book; my view
of psychoanalysis as a form of collaborative art is central to how the analyst
works with his disappointments in the analytic process. In a later chapter, I will
explore more specifically the application of abstract expressionism to the analyst’s
role in making the patient more understandable to himself and the analyst.
In Chapter 3, I try to explore myriad meanings of the analyst’s sense of dis-
appointment and limitation with particular reference to bearing repetition in
clinical work. Elements of disappointment or a sense of incompleteness often
reflect realistic assessments of dyadic and existential limitation for integration
at any juncture of analytic work. I refer to places of repetition as crime scenes
that are visited and revisited by the patient with the analyst. An important
function of psychoanalysis relates to how it provides for the patient a play-
ground for the transformation of desire, anxiety, sadness, and anger into a kind
of good enough disappointment and incompleteness. Sometimes the analyst’s
experiences of disappointment relate to his accurate read on these existential
limitations. Sometimes his or her difficulty bearing disappointment relates to
unconsciously grandiose or inhibited expectations. Both unconsciously grand-
iose and inhibited expectations may serve to titrate his or her anxiety about
both incompleteness and the risks of knowing about and analyzing transference.
At still other times his capacity to bear disappointment relates to a repository
of regret or sadness about either his own limitations as an analyst and in his
own analysis or as an analyst in his work with patients. Repetition marks
the places where the patient and analyst are able to be the least and most
imaginative with regard to the patient’s adaptation to psychic pain.
In Chapter 4, I try to look at the special challenges of working with relatively
silent patients. I present three sessions from the beginning phase of an analysis
of a young man and discuss each session with a particular set of concerns.
More specifically, the imagination of the analyst is asked to work in particular
ways in these circumstances, imagining the internal ruin that the patient is
experiencing silently, contributing at times to the transference seeming less fig-
urable. I try to get at some of the challenges of a dedicated interest in the
patient’s internal objects while holding fantasies and wishes that the patient
might be able to experience elements of the analyst as an external object. These
Introduction 9
fantasies require special attention because they are often just that—fantasies
that the external provision is sometimes at odds with the internal object
experience and can divert the analyst from providing the patient with the real
help that analysis puts on offer. In this chapter, I provide vignettes from three
consecutive sessions as the patient was emerging from a state of relative silence
to expressing more directly some particular transference patterns that had been
repressed, suppressed and to some extent dissociated.
In Chapter 5, I look at several dimensions related to the analyst’s relationship
to the field of psychoanalysis: I examine the analyst’s relationship to his own

analysis or analyses over time; to the psychoanalytic theory or theories that he
holds; and to the analyst’s stage of career as it relates to his clinical work. In
this chapter, two vignettes from different patients are used to illustrate the
analyst’s struggles with these problems.
In Chapter 6, I have written with an emphasis on the indispensable construct
of the internal object. For object relations theorists, this is an obvious and banal
observation. The paper on which this chapter is based was written in particular
to analysts who think of themselves as relationally oriented. In my view, rela-
tional theory has lost too much of its original attempt to integrate notions of
internal object relations with the interpersonal relationship with the analyst. I
try to spell out what I mean by a dedicated interest in the internal object and
suggest that much of the most intense and in some sense personal elements of
the analyst’s participation relate to his involvement with the patient’s internal
objects. I also try to emphasize the virtues of the analyst’s opacity and suggest
that the analyst and patient’s interest in reaching for what is mysterious inside
(unconscious conflict, fantasy, thoughts and feelings) is a far cry from cultivat-
ing mystification. The insights fostered by relational theory and other branches
of object relations theory that put the patient’s read on the analyst into focus
do not require us to lose a sense of the analyst’s needs for privacy in thinking
and working, nor to minimize the special opportunities that the analyst’s rela-
tive opacity provides the patient for understanding what is inside him.
Chapter 7 examines the concept of the new object as the reworking of the
patient’s internal object world that occurs as the result of a relative particular
kind of contact with an external object, the analyst, who struggles with it. In
saying this, I believe that several other chapters in this book relate to this
theme, but I try to make more explicit here how the analyst will fail in various
ways both in the patient’s assessment and his own in helping patients to find
ways that the analyst functions as a transference object and as an analyst
helping to understand and work with this experience. Helping the patient to
integrate this failure—a part of the achievement of the depressive position—
occurs both within the mind of the patient and the analyst. It is, in a sense, a
part of how the analyst functions as a new object.
The sometimes useful kind of contact that is my focus in this chapter—a very
particular kind of “new bad object” (Cooper, 2010)—relates to the patient’s
awareness of the ebb and flow of the analyst’s struggle to remain reflective. The
10 Introduction
analyst’s struggle in this regard involves repeated sequences of being recruited

to play a role in the patient’s object world, followed by his reflection upon this
recruitment and its effect on his construction of meaning. The patient’s
recruitment, and hence the content of the analyst’s self-reflection, results both
from the pull that the patient exerts upon the analyst and from factors on the
analyst’s side, including the analyst’s countertransference to the analytic
method. The analyst’s struggle unwittingly reveals to the patient the analyst’s
real limitations as a listener and constructer of meaning. I will refer to several
clinical examples and vignettes in earlier chapters and some new vignettes that
reflect and highlight some of this struggle.
The most specialized and perhaps controversial chapter in the book, Chapter
8, is also the one that is, at first glance, the least related to the themes of the
volume. I look at the concept of boundary from an aesthetic point of view and
suggest that the concept of psychic boundaries is sufficiently complex, both
theoretically and aesthetically, that to utilize the term boundary by terming
sexual misconduct as a boundary violation is to a great extent obfuscating. I
will argue that since “boundaries” are fragile metaphoric constructions essential
in our psychoanalytic work, the tendency to concretize them in pragmatic for-
ensic discourse undermines our capacity to explore psychic phenomena. One
might even say that by reducing the metaphor of boundaries so insistently to a
single behavioral referent—the alleged “sexual boundary”—we “violate”
another boundary that is constitutive of psychoanalysis itself: the implicit
boundaries related to the concepts of transference and fantasy.
I believe that psychoanalysts are psychic boundary artists of a kind, traveling
between the concrete and symbolic realms, between transference and counter-
transference, between what is verbally expressed and enacted, and between the
patient’s internal objects and our provision as outsiders and insiders in relation
to the patient’s internalized world. Actual sexual misconduct with patients is
varied in its meanings, but we have many descriptive tools at our disposal
to characterize this behavior. In this chapter, I explore some subtle forms
of avoidance and unwitting obfuscation on the part of us as analysts in
referring to this misconduct as a boundary violation. To the extent that a
breach in ethical behavior does involve actual failure by the analyst, this
chapter does have an important place in any discussion of how we struggle
as analysts.
The term post-pluralistic did not appear in the final published version of the
paper that became Chapter 9 of this book, but it did appear in the first issue of
IJP Open. I use post-pluralistic to refer to the notion that there has been much
cross-fertilization of foci and ideas in clinical psychoanalysis, more than is
sometimes apparent from reading the literature on clinical theory and the
theory of technique. In the chapter, I examine five authors from a variety of
traditions, including Kleinian, ego psychology and broadly relational, and sug-
gest that these writers reflect overarching clinical sensibilities that extend to
analysts outside their “home” clinical theory.
Introduction 11
The term post-pluralistic was found to be somewhat controversial to both

journal reviewers and to colleagues posting on IJP Open. Much of the criticism
had to do with the question of general acceptance that we live in a pluralistic
psychoanalytic world to begin with. In other words, many would argue that
while we have many different points of view, most analysts work strictly within
one tradition. I disagree with this perspective, but not because I have a stake
one way or the other in promoting a pluralistic point of view. I suggest that
some forms of clinical theory unintentionally (unconsciously) provide us with a
kind of border language—language that extends particular ways of seeing to

speak to analysts’ broader clinical and theoretical concerns. At a speculative
level, the theory that I have tried to describe here tells us de facto about some of
the ways that analysts across orientations unwittingly communicate about their
clinical findings.
Clinical theory becomes more enlivening to the extent that we know more
about particular kinds of limitations in theory that become inflection points in
theory development. It allows students to feel the analyst’s struggles with using
and reconciling clinical theory and clinical work. These contributions offer us
elements of the theorist’s conscious and unconscious conflicts in theorizing that
we are seeking to resolve through thinking, writing and reading about our
work. In a sense, the book concludes with the analyst trying to work in the
depressive position in creating and revising clinical theory.
References
Beckett, S. (1984). Worstward Ho. New York, NY: Grove Press/Atlantic.
Bromberg, P. M. (1995). Resistance, object usage, and human relatedness. Contemporary
Psychoanalysis, 31: 163–192.
Chused, J. F., & Raphling, D. L. (1992). The analyst’s mistakes. Journal of the Amer-
ican Psychoanalytic Association, 40: 89–116.
Cooper, S. (1996). Interpretive fallibility and the psychoanalytic dialogue. Journal of the
American Psychoanalytic Association, 41: 95–126 .
Cooper, S. (2000a). Objects of Hope: Exploring Possibility and Limit in Psychoanalysis.
Hillsdale, NJ: The Analytic Press.
Cooper, S. (2000b). Mutual containment in the psychoanalytic process. Psychoanalytic
Dialogues, 10: 166–189.
Cooper, S. (2010). A Disturbance in the Field: Essays in Transference-Countertransference.
New York, NY: Routledge.
Diebenkorn, R. (1993). Notes to myself on beginning a painting. Unpublished notes.
Feldman, M. (1994). Projective identification in phantasy and enactment. Psychoanalytic
Inquiry, 14: 423–440.
Feldman, M. (1997). Projective identification: The analyst’s involvement. International
Journal of Psychoanalysis, 78: 227–241.
Feldman, M. (1999). The defensive use of compliance. Psychoanalytic Inquiry, 19: 22–39.
Friedman, L. (2007).The delicate balance of work and illusion in psychoanalytic.
Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 76: 817–833.
12 Introduction
Heaney, S. (2012). Preoccupations: Selected Prose, 1968–1978. London: Faber & Faber.
Joseph, B. (1985). Transference: The total situation. International Journal of
Levenson, E. A. (1992). Mistakes, errors, and oversights. Contemporary Psychoanalysis,
28: 555–571.
Mitchell, S. A. (1991). Wishes, needs, and interpersonal negotiations. Psychoanalytic
Inquiry, 11: 147–171.
O’Shaughnessy, E. (1992). Enclaves and excursions. International Journal of
Parsons, M. (2006). The analyst’s countertransference to the psychoanalytic process.

International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 87: 1183–1198.
Parsons, M. (2007). Raiding the inarticulate: The internal analytic setting and listening
beyond countertransference. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 88: 1441–1456.
Racker, H. (1952). Transference and Countertransference. New York, NY: International
Universities Press.
Rosenfeld, H. (1987). Impasse and Interpretation: Therapeutic and Anti-Therapeutic
Factors in the Psychoanalytic Treatment of Psychotic, Borderline, and Neurotic
Patients. London: Routledge.
Schafer, R. (1983). The Analytic Attitude. New York, NY: Basic Books.
Schafer, R. (2003). Bad Feelings. New York, NY: Other Press.
Smith, H. (2000). Countertransference, conflictual listening, and the analytic object rela-
tionship. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 48: 95–128.
Smith, H. (2003). Conceptions of conflict in psychoanalytic theory and practice. Psycho-
analytic Quarterly, 72: 49–96.
Steiner, J. (1993). Psychic Retreats: Pathological Organizations of the Personality in
Psychotic, Neurotic and Borderline Patients. London: Routledge.
Winnicott, D. W. (1954). The depressive position in normal emotional development. In
Through Paediatrics to Psychoanalysis (pp262–277). New York, NY: Basic Books,
1958.
Chapter 1
Ruin and beauty I: Some basic

assumptions and models of the
analyst’s relationship to the
depressive position
The artist is not trying to produce pretty or even beautiful form, he is engaged in the
most important task of re-creating his ruined internal world and the resulting
form will depend on how well he succeeds in his task.
(Clive Bell, 1914, p33)
Great works of art, especially novels, challenge us rather than tell us how to decide
who’s wrong and right at every turn. When the great novel is completed, more
often than not, ambiguity rather than the satisfaction of harmony (fantasy) reigns.
Recently, Elena Ferrante (2014) went even further and stated: “Books don’t change
your life. At most, if they are good, they can hurt and bring confusion” (p7).
I begin with the novelist in part because just as some novelists are helping us to see
characters as a whole without delusion or despair, I think that the analyst is trying to
help her patient look as much as possible at her life as a whole. Patients come to
know those who live inside them in new ways that transform particular kinds of
disharmony into new, hopefully more satisfying or settled forms of disharmony.
For most of us, even after productive and inspiring analysis, we will contend
with easier and more difficult parts of ourselves, and life will continue to be out
of joint in certain ways. The analyst holds/contains this unsettling narrative in
the service of helping the patient to better contain her narrative. That is, in the
end, one of the most important ways that analysis is profoundly helpful and, in
my view, among the best of what we offer. Every analysis is incomplete.
In a sense, this capacity to accept incompleteness is as good an explanation of
the depressive position as any other. Freud summarized the depressive position
(without referring to it with this name) so succinctly when he described his new
form of treatment that, in the end, replaces human misery with ordinary
unhappiness. It was one of the more important features of genius and courage
that Freud could suggest such a bold treatment with such a breathtaking
method, directed toward such a seemingly modest, ordinary aim. Anything but
modest in its aim, though, Freud’s theory of mind takes at its core that freedom
is never as organized as tyranny. Thus, we need to appreciate even a modicum
of freedom that we eke out through analytic work.
14 Ruin and beauty I
Freud’s psychiatric discovery of something that, of course, had been deeply

understood by artists, playwrights and philosophers for centuries—a basic
respect for the dynamic tension between desire and prohibition, love and
aggression, and expressiveness and restraint at the center of the psyche—
required a practitioner who could work in the depressive position. This con-
stant tension between therapeutic ambition and modesty was but one of many
ways that he suggested working in the depressive position. Another was his
ability to give himself over to investigation, hypothesis-generating activity, and
revision in his theory, which we witness again and again in his letters to Fliess
(e.g., Anzieu, 1986, p618). His evolving theory, in certain ways, embodied the
notion of incompleteness, even though he suffered with its evolution.
Freud’s suggestions for therapeutic neutrality and modesty were technical
prescriptions, thoughtful and wise regarding a realistic assessment of what
analysis could achieve. In this reasoned modesty, Freud in essence put forward
the deep understanding that if the analyst is not able to live in the realm (or
close to the realm) of the depressive position regarding analytic work, he is
unlikely to help the patient to reach this position vis-à-vis the patient’s
interiority.
One of the great challenges of working as an analyst involves maintaining
hopefulness and therapeutic ambition while respecting the patient’s limitations
for change. I believe that this balance within the analyst is one of the most
important parts of the patient’s experience of the analyst’s inner attitude (Nacht,
1962). Some analysts come naturally to a good balance of these attitudes, while
others begin with levels of hopefulness and ambition that can feel insensitive to the
patient’s anxiety or trepidation about change. Other analysts are so melancholic
in their attitudes toward life that this inner attitude fails to productively truck
with the parts of the patient that are ready and eager to change. Many of us go
through different phases related to the balance of modesty and ambition in our
work based on our developmental phases as analysts and as persons.
One cannot assume the depressive position through fiat or good intentions.
The depressive position, like the Oedipus complex, is not something that can be
finally achieved or entirely worked through. Britton et al. (2012) have argued
this point in relationship to the Oedipus complex, and it has been implied in
more implicit ways in many psychoanalytic writings. The analyst’s training or
personal analysis is helpful in reaching it, but the depressive position for
both patient and analyst is not a destination, it is a journey involving
hard-fought achievement and ongoing struggle. The analyst works with each
patient in finding that seam in which we help patients to reach new psychic
achievements and equilibrium. We try to help patients to accept psychic lim-
itation, an acceptance that is relatively distinct from resignation, submission
and resentment.
My colleague Jonathan Palmer, an analyst and a painter, has put it (personal
communication) that the analyst’s stance is a created surface as close to the
depressive position that the analyst can achieve at any particular moment in a
Ruin and beauty I 15
session or in analytic process. From this point of view, the analyst’s mind, the
analytical mind of the analyst has to be constantly discovered and rediscovered
as it is lost and found in clinical work.
The effort expended by both patients and analysts to help the patient bear
psychic pain is often as much a source of enormous warmth and comfort as it is
uncomfortable for the patient. One could characterize it as a kind of partner-
ship in bearing the existential realities of the patient’s personhood as well as the
analyst’s personhood.
Part of the notion of working toward the depressive position is working with
the considerable ambiguity and risks related to the outcome of any analyses.
Perhaps every analyst is a bit like Daedalus, who invented flight, but whose son
Icarus flew too close to the sun. While his invention of wings didn’t hold up for
Icarus, there was clearly some operator error in play. Each analysis begins with
the intention and accompanying fantasies about leaving the bondage of inter-
nalized objects; each of our internalized scenarios leaves us in varying degrees
of no exit situations. Psychoanalysis is an invention to help us work with this
no exit situation, a psychic Crete from which we seek to escape. When analysis
is successful, it is rarely a full escape, but Crete becomes a much more enli-
vening and aesthetically pleasing place than it felt to Daedalus and his son.
Escape is, from the point of view of the analyst, tragic in its own right, since
escape is a fantasy that cannot be achieved. If where we psychically live lies in
our relationship to internalized objects, we are aiming for more freedom but
not escape. As James Baldwin (1956) put it, “Perhaps home is less a particular
place than an irrevocable condition” (p37). So our wings in analysis are put to
work less in the service of flight from somewhere than a helping us to fly more
freely, less rigidly, within our home territory.
Another dimension of the analyst’s work toward the depressive position—
and among the most radical of Freud’s discoveries—was the notion that none
of us can entirely trust ourselves in knowing what we claim to know. Clearly,
there is more to each of us than meets the eye. Our capacities for dissemblance
make us unreliable knowers and narrators. It was only a matter of time
before the unreliability of the analyst’s knowing would become both a source
of questioning and an essential tool in helping us to conduct the work of
analysis.
This radical boundary in psychoanalytic work—that patient as well as ana-
lyst cannot know all that we are expressing—means that we put our minds,
our psychic life in the mind of a trained professional so that we might see if he
or she can help us understand more about what we were saying. Contemporary
analytic thinking that questions the authority of the analyst has done so in some
ways because the unreliability of the analyst’s mind is now better accepted as a
given in the analytic situation. Bion had a great deal to do with advancing this
particular idea, and of course it was developed significantly by the epistemolo-
gical revolution in analytic thinking created by analysts from particularly within
the array of Bionian, Independent, Relational and Kleinian traditions.
I want to try to give some experiential life to the analyst’s relationship to the
depressive position—not just his patient’s, but his own in relationship to the
process of analytic work and analysis as a profession. This means giving life to
the sources of resistance for the analyst to experience and work with limitation
and grief in the analytic process.
In this chapter, I begin to examine some background about several ways that
the analyst’s work toward the depressive position has been described, both
directly and indirectly. In the theoretically based chapter that follows, I will
focus on some of the chief types of resistance to the analyst’s work in the
depressive position.
Some ways of thinking about the analyst’s capacities for the

depressive position
Many analysts have drawn our attention to the coexistence of primitive and
more mature forms of thinking and symbolizing. Since Bion, many have
understood that unconscious mental life is characterized by the healthy dialec-
tical interplay of the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions (Bion, 1962)
and of the coexistence (in health and in psychopathological states) of the psy-
chotic and non-psychotic parts of the personality (Bion, 1957). This insight was
featured even earlier in Susan Isaacs’s (1952) paper alluding to the internal
interplay for patients between the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions
(Ogden, 2012).
A great deal has been written about the analyst’s experience of the progress
and limitations of analysis, especially in the context of termination. Analysts as
diverse as Klein (1952), Winnicott (1960) and Schafer (2003) have written
beautifully on the analyst’s relationship to the depressive position in the context
of termination. Given the plethora of writing related to the patient’s manifes-
tations and experiences of the depressive position, there are still relatively fewer
discussions that specify what it is for the analyst to maintain this position in his
ongoing work. Instead, we know that much of our analytic literature involves
de facto our countertransference resistances to listening in the depressive posi-
tion. We also can infer current thinking about a kind of analyst depressive
position from other avenues, such as our thinking about neutrality, good
enough interpretation, and the good enough ability to contain and metabolize
the patient’s affects and unconscious fantasy.
Schafer (2003) is particularly noteworthy among current writers in how much
he explicitly maps this territory related to the analyst’s ongoing attempts to
maintain the depressive position. He does so by focusing on the necessary ana-
lytic talent for accepting incompleteness in the conduct of any piece of analytic
work.
Klein (1957) suggested that the depressive position is characterized by the
capacity to accept and regulate inevitable tendencies toward ambivalence in a
relatively stable way. The individual learns that all goodness is imperfect, in
that it is mixed with aggressive potential. Furthermore, defenses and uncon-

scious fantasy operate to mitigate our experiences of goodness. Within the
depressive position, we learn to live with ambivalence and to understand that
this ambivalence will never be fully overcome. Samuel Beckett (1984) captured
an acceptance of incompleteness in his melancholic phrase: “Ever tried. Ever
failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” In other words, to be
human is to inevitably fail in certain ways, and striving is always embedded in
the context of this appreciation.
Klein (1952) also argued that in the analyses of adults and children, together
with a full experience of depression, feelings of hope emerge. She stated that “in
early development, this is one of the factors which helps the infant to overcome the
depressive position” (p214). Omnipotence decreases as the infant gains a greater
confidence both in his objects and in his reparative powers, as he experiences
that what he is able to achieve provides pleasure to those he loves and, in so
doing, undoes the harm done or imagined to be done by his aggressive impulses.
As Ogden (2012) highlighted so well, Winnicott’s (1945) “Primitive Emo-
tional Development” is a revolutionary essay in several different ways, one that has
relevance to the analyst’s capacity for the depressive position. While Winnicott
doesn’t mention the depressive position by name in this paper, and thus not the
analyst’s relationship to the depressive position, he is de facto dealing with his
understanding of this process in remarkably prescient and creative ways. He states:
The depressed patient requires of his analyst the understanding that the ana-
lyst’s work is to some extent his effort to cope with his own (the analyst’s)
depression, or shall I say guilt and grief resultant from the destructive ele-
ments in his own (the analyst’s) love. To press further along these lines, the
patient who is asking for help in regard to his primitive, pre-depressive
relationship to objects needs his analyst to be able to see the analyst’s undis-
placed and co-incident love and hate of him. In such cases the end of the hour,
the end of the analysis, the rules and regulations, these all come in as
important expressions of hate, just as the good interpretations are expressions
of love, and symbolical of good food and care (Winnicott, 1945, p146).
As Ogden (2012) put it, Winnicott is doing nothing less than proposing a new
model of countertransference. He is suggesting that depression is a manifestation
of the patient’s taking on as his own, in fantasy, elements of his mother’s
depression (or that of other loved objects) with the unconscious aim of relieving her
of her depression. This is a kind of explanation that features the intergenerational
origin and dynamic structure of depression. But more important to the present
discussion, Winnicott is suggesting that if the analyst is unable to cope with his
own feelings of depression (both normative as in the depressive position and
problematic or pathological as in the paranoid position), the analyst will be
unable to experience the ways in which the patient is trying to absorb the
depression of the analyst as a transference mother. Again, returning to Ogden:
Winnicott is suggesting that only if the analyst is able to contain/live with

the experience of the internal object mother’s depression (as distinct from
his own depression) will he be able to experience the patient’s pathological
effort to relieve the mother’s psychological pain (now felt to be located in
the analyst) by introjecting it into himself (the patient) as a noxious foreign
body (Ogden, 2012, p80).
It’s worth noting that part of what is revolutionary here is that Winnicott is not
primarily focused on the important issues related to how patients do not allow
the analyst to have his mind and work with evenly suspended attention.
Instead, Winnicott is interested in what the analyst carries inside that interferes
with the use of free-floating attention in order to better know the patient’s
internal objects.
Winnicott is suggesting that in order for the analyst to be able to experience
and understand the patient’s internal object mother’s depression that is being
projected into the analyst, the analyst must have enough purchase on his own
depression that arises from sources independent of his unconscious identifica-
tion with his patient’s depressed internal object. Otherwise, the patient cannot find
in the analyst his internal objects that he is controlled by, attached to, and trying to
integrate in some way with his relationship with his analyst. The analyst cannot
create a “psychic base” (Money-Kyrle, 1968) or a “home for the mind” (Spezzano,
2007) for the patient. In turn, the patient cannot experience the analyst’s mind as a
source of containment and safe base from which to explore what the patient is
communicating about that he cannot understand on his own.
The analyst’s capacity to bear the impact of the patient’s internal pain and
attachment to painful objects also involves the demands that his love may have
on the patient. He must not be so worried about the patient’s concerns,
demands and anger about the analyst’s failure to love and gratify that the
patient is unable to find a home for his familiar experiences of conflict and
disappointment with the other. The analyst’s love for the patient is not quite
the same as his needs for reparation; the analyst’s needs for reparation pose
particular problems for those patients engaged in the eroticization of suffering
(e.g., Green, 2011).
I view the analyst’s capacity to experience the depressive position as including
his capacity to understand the limits of the analytic relationship. It includes the
analyst’s awareness that he will do the best he can with uncertainty about its
results. It requires of the analyst to know those internal objects that disturb or
even torment the patient. This element of the analyst’s dedicated listening to
all elements of the patient’s internal world is anathema for many patients who
are threatened by its meaning, particularly in relationship to those they carry
inside.
In his summary of the depressive position, Schafer (2003, pp. 115–116) lucidly
notes some of the characteristics of the analyst’s depressive position, mostly in
the negative:
Its constituent elements have been specified only when countertransference

has led to a disruptive enactment. Then, the observer—it may be the self
observing analyst—accents the negative of the depressive position. Mention
might be made of lapsed tolerance of ambivalence, ambiguity, and inde-
terminacy; disappearance of curious caring, and responsible attitudes;
inability to maintain neutrality or equidistance from the constituents of
intersystemic and intrasystemic conflict; decrease of patience; violation of
ethical requirements; irrationality; impaired personal integration; and reli-
ance on the primitive defenses and omnipotent fantasies and lead to

manipulation and persecution of the analyst.
Schafer adds several more factors involving a firm belief that analyzing means
trying to understand human development in the analytic situation, in particular
as influenced by fantasies and conflicts. Schafer emphasizes the method of free
association in providing cues that reveal unconscious desires and influences. It
seems to me that another factor is a kind of dedicated listening for the patient’s
need to elaborate internalized experience and their attachment to earlier objects.
Schafer argues convincingly that the great obstacle to the analyst’s ability to
work in the depressive position is his own inability to hold on to a sense of
goodness in himself or the analytic process during various parts of analytic
work. Feldman (1993, 2013) has also highlighted the numerous contexts in which
the analyst’s doubts or lack of conviction may appear in therapeutic work. Some
patients need to spoil the experience of receiving care and, as I will outline in
the next chapter, some patients envy their analysts for their equanimity and even
his or her ability to hold caring or loving feelings for the patient. Psychoanalysts
also have tendencies of their own for self-reproach and self-loathing that relate
to their limitations as analysts (providing) or as analytic patients (receiving).
One of the most significant sources of self-reproach, and one that is under-
scored by Schafer, is the analyst’s capacity to accept that analysis is not an
omnipotently powerful therapeutic tool for change. It is conducted by highly
limited individuals—patients and analysts—and part of working in the depres-
sive position is working toward integrating this sobering fact of analytic life.
Manifestations of intolerance of incompleteness and absence of the depressive
position in the analytic attitude include the analyst’s resentment, grandiosity,
manic denial of incompleteness, blame, guilty feelings, self-reproach, or turning
against the method of analysis itself.
Cooper (2010a), in an examination of the “grandiosity of self-loathing,”
referred to how many times patients’ and analysts’ self-reproach occurs in the
context of unconsciously grandiose expectations. The analyst’s self-recrimina-
tion about the limitations of analytic work sometimes rests on the uncon-
sciously heroic expectations about what can be achieved. Particularly for less
experienced analysts, these heroic or grandiose expectations have less to do
with characterologic grandiosity than with understandable ideals and hopes
about the impact of analytic work. Still another element of grandiosity
sometimes involves the analyst's obliviousness to her own self-care (Harris,

2009; Harris and Sinsheimer, 2008).
Some of Green’s (2011) late work was very much organized around themes
related to the intrinsically incomplete nature of analytic work and delves into
the area of “Illusions and Disillusions of Analytic Work.” In his remarkable
continuing discussion of the internalization of the negative, he discusses a group
of patients who, while able to use him as a “good enough” maternal image with
some elements of benevolence and reparation, were unable to “erase the
patient’s memory of the primitive mother” (Green, 2011, p171). In an attempt

to come to terms with the incompleteness of analysis in such circumstances,
Green terms “disillusions” those cases that are not failures but in which the
internalized mother is indestructible. He tries to reconcile some of the gains that
were achieved even in the analytic context of substantial forms of resistance,
rebelliousness, or exhaustion. He tells the reader that he has tried to “nuance
his opinion” of these treatments, suggesting that he has tried to move away
from dichotomous forms of evaluating success and failure in analytic work.
I take Green (2011) to be trying to demonstrate to analysts that he is working
to salvage what remains after the idealized view of analytic work—to see
beauty after ruin, as it were. Even in the context of the most difficult patients,
Green is trying to discuss our need to understand the patient’s effort to survive
and do the best that he can. If in fact this destructive drive is in operation and
not deeply touched by psychoanalytic work in the ways that we wish, it is just
as likely the limitation of psychoanalysis as a method as it is operator error. As
is clear, Green’s recent work in this regard was primarily connected to the
analyst and patient’s assessment of the progress of work in the context of
termination.
One of the major features of the analyst working in the depressive position
involves his ability to listen to the patient’s internal world as an internal world.
This means that the analyst is able to listen for displacement, metaphors, sym-
bols, enactment, and allusions to the transference in a relatively comfortable
way. By “comfortable,” I mean to suggest that the analyst is relatively at ease in
being open to his disturbance in listening (e.g., Cooper, 2010b; LaFarge, 2014;
Parsons, 2007; Smith, 2000).
The analyst’s comfort in working also means that, in considering the
patient’s internal world, he is also able to think about unintended effects that
his participation is having on the patient. This latter dimension is not usually
highlighted by contemporary Kleinians or by Schafer (2003) as part of the ana-
lyst’s capacity to work in the depressive position, though it is gradually being
given more and more consideration (e.g., Steiner, 1993).
Parsons’s (2007) concept of the internal analytic setting has been useful to me
in thinking about our relationship to the analytic process and in particular to
the analyst’s work in the depressive position. The internal analytic setting is a
psychic arena in which reality is defined by such concepts as symbolism, fan-
tasy, transference and unconscious meaning. These operate throughout the
mind of the analyst and are part of what constitutes psychic reality in the
therapeutic process. Just as the external setting defines and protects a spatio-
temporal arena in which patient and analyst can conduct the work of analysis,
so the internal setting defines and protects an area of the analyst’s mind where
whatever happens, including what happens to the external setting, can be con-
sidered from a psychoanalytic viewpoint. Thus both Parsons and Schafer ela-
borate a kind of dedicated listening on the analyst’s part to the mysteriousness
of what patients are expressing.
This listening is notably unconventional in terms of human conversation and

communication, leading me to emphasize a particular quality of the analyst’s
listening in the depressive position that is not explicitly elaborated by Green
(2011), Parsons (2007) and Schafer (2003). It is essential that the analyst be
comfortable in a certain way being alone. His attempt to bear painful affect; his
need to hold uncertainty and doubt; his development of theories about his
patient’s meaning; his capacity to listen for metaphors, to reach beyond con-
ventional meanings; and his need to be shameless in creating and letting go of
metaphors are all embedded in the context of degrees of solitude. While it is not
made explicit by Winnicott in his writing about analytic listening, it is implied
in his paper on the analyst’s depression (Winnicott, 1945) and in his paper on
the capacity to be alone in the presence of another (Winnicott, 1958). Bion’s
writing is both implicit and explicit about the need for the analyst and patient
to be alone together.
Buechler (1998) refers to a classic, posthumously published article on lone-
liness by Fromm-Reichmann (1990). In Fromm-Reichmann’s article, she cites
Courtauld’s observations of isolation in a Greenland weather station. Courtauld
(1932, p23) recommends that “only persons with active, imaginative minds, who
do not suffer from a nervous disposition and are not given to brooding, and who
can occupy themselves by such means as reading, should go on polar expeditions.”
Buechler aptly notes that the habits of mind necessary to tolerate a weather
station are similar to those involving bearing the loneliness of analytic
exploration. I view the similarity useful up to a point, but I think it collapses
with regard to the kinds of solitude that we feel in the presence of another
person and contrasts with experiences of actual physical/interpersonal isolation.
However, both involve—indeed require—an imaginative mind and the capacity
to be nurtured by stimulation from other analysts.
More than anything, this capacity to bear solitude is in line with the norma-
tive stage of development characterized by the depressive position. It is a “mode
of generating experience” (Ogden, 1989, p9) and involves elements of “whole
object relatednesss, ambivalence, and a deep sense of loss in recognizing one’s
separateness from one’s mother” (p10).
This analytic capacity for solitude or loneliness is not meant to minimize that
many patients are great collaborators and psychically creative in their own
right. As patients make progress, they generate many metaphors, bear affect,
and hold doubt in their own minds and help the analyst to help them.
Furthermore, patients often contain elements of the analyst’s experience,

including many aspects of the analyst’s countertransference doubt (e.g., Cooper,
2000). I have sometimes wondered whether some patients are able to hold the
analyst’s doubts or guilt about the incompleteness of what we offer in ways that
help move analysis forward. In my clinical work and supervisory work with
others, I have had the sense that some patients are able to hold a conviction
about the value of treatment when the analyst’s private doubts are not men-
tioned explicitly but no doubt experienced by patients in one form or other.
I think of solitude in analytic work as referring to the many ways that the
analyst needs to hold elements of how our work is uniquely capable of stirring
up wishes and needs that will not be gratified (Freud, 1909; Friedman, 2007) in
the setup and arrangements that make analytic work possible (see Chapter 7).
There are elements of solitude and privacy intrinsic to the internal analytic
attitude, one that requires the analyst to constantly give himself over to think-
ing about unconscious meaning and communication. This involvement and
immersion in the analytic attitude creates an element of solitude for the analyst
even with the most engaging patients, even with the most intimate forms of erotic
and aggressive transferences. These modes are on display even with the most
collaborative patients, who are able to join with the analyst in understanding
aspects of their work and resistance.
Naturally, all analysts feel especially alone when we are in the position of
working for long stretches of time with patients who are relatively silent or
immersed in negative transference or unwieldy erotic transferences as well. In a
sense, I believe that the single most important aspect of the analyst’s working
toward the depressive position is his own capacity to maintain an “affirmative”
attitude (e.g., Kris, 1990; Schafer, 1983, 2003). In this attitude, the analyst is
dedicated to looking for reasons to help patients understand why they are doing
and saying what they are saying, especially when they are entrenched in thorny
elements of resistance. All of this translates to the analyst’s conviction that the
patient is doing the best he can to communicate and understand how the patient
holds his affects and conflicts, his unsettling narrative.
Analysts, like patients, shift back and forth in their countertransference from
the depressive to the paranoid position and back again. Steiner (2011) has
described struggles for dominance in the Oedipal situation. He explores familiar
situations in which the patient feels that the analyst is imposing a structure on
their relationship through interpretation or holding the analytic setting. The
patient experiences the analyst’s authority as arbitrary, leaving the patient with
the baleful choice to submit or rebel. Sometimes, the analyst may feel threa-
tened by his patient for reasons that relate to his own unresolved feelings about
dominance, submission, helplessness, or humiliation. In these instances, the
analyst may feel persecuted by the patient’s anger and accusations about the
frame and analytic process rather than working to understand the particular
dilemma that the analytic dyad has created together. What emerges from an
understanding of the persecutory version is that the impasse cannot be resolved
by a victory of one party over the other. Identifications have to be abandoned,

which may lead to a depressive crisis.
Analysts each have conscious and unconscious fantasies about analysis and
about therapeutic action, how analysis will go. This fantasy is operating and at
times being levied against the patient’s and the analyst’s actual behavior and
performance. Smith (2004) referred to embedded fantasies of idealized patients
that we as analysts carry and that influence our listening. Cooper (2010b) dis-
cussed the ways in which analysts often have anticipatory fantasies about how
sessions will go as well, which are probably related to both idealized and
dreaded fantasies of the patient and the analysis. I will examine more about
these problems of idealization and anticipation in the next chapter.
While I view these fantasies as potentially a hindrance to the progress of
analytic work just as they can also help us to understand built-in negative
countertransference, they involve the analyst’s difficulty in working toward and
within the depressive position. Sometimes, these fantasies can be persecutory in
blaming either the patient or analyst for not living up to idealized fantasies
about the patient or the ideals that the analyst holds for the analyst. It is
sobering that these aren’t only possibilities but occur at different times in many
analyses, and the question is to what extent they figure into the process. These
types of fantasies and disappointed expectations include many other patterns,
such as envy of the patient, idealization, overriding attraction and manic flight,
and eroticism cloaking aggression. It is sometimes a problem of analytic hubris
or defensively earnest intentions on the part of the analyst to believe that they
will not accompany analytic work.
Let it float
I spend a great deal of time fly fishing in Massachusetts, Connecticut and
Montana. Over 30 years ago when I was trying to learn much more about how to
successfully fly fish, I had a wonderful guide, James Mark, in Montana for a few
days on a favorite spring creek of mine. In the time since, I have run into James
now and then on that same Spring Creek when he and I are fishing each July.
When I was learning to fish I worked with a number of guides who were all
different in style. Occasionally I still have a guide because I can always learn
something from them. Like most forms of art, intellectual matters, sports and
certainly analysis, learning insect life and good casting is an interminable pro-
cess. Each guide has a unique style. Some are highly active and oriented toward
commenting on many things that the angler is doing while others pick and
choose their instruction.
It has always struck me that James was from the Independent tradition in
terms of instruction. His focus, without using many words, was always on
engendering play and creating a transitional space between the two of us for
working together. Only very occasionally did he make a comment on technical
execution despite the fact that there was much to comment on regarding these
matters. Each cast that is made is either executed well and will float down
without much drag in the line imitating the way in which an insect falls gently
on the water or it has drag and looks like something foreign to a trout. Most of
my casts were ok but occasionally James would just say, “Pick it up and go
again.” This meant that the cast wasn’t worth even keeping on the water. There
were others though, more ambiguous, in which it was a bit less clear, in
between a realistic presentation and one that contained drag. He would say in
response to the ones in doubt, “What do you think?” At other times, his state-
ment “What do you think?” was followed by, “I like it. What do you think?”
And at still other times, he would add if he ended up really liking it after not
being so sure, “Let’s let it float.”
I loved the sound of his words, “What do you think? I like it. Let’s let it
float.” In that space, the cast had moved from a place of ambiguity into a place
of potential reward (usually not actually being rewarded with a fish but the
feeling of accomplishing a good enough cast and possibility was stimulated).
There was a feeling of warmth about our collaboration and a sense of his
valuing my mind in his words, “What do you think?” I knew what was a good
cast, what was a terrible cast, and what was a cast that wasn’t immediately
discernable in terms of quality. We could talk about it together and a space was
created in that conversation about the good, the bad and the ugly.
James, as fishing guide/analyst in these moments, was working in the
depressive position in terms of his angling client. My sense of what was mem-
orable was that he was comfortable working in the space of determining what
was likely to float and what wasn’t. He brought to the situation an openness
about indeterminacy and a willingness to sometimes take a guess. He also
brought to the situation a sense of collaboration with his client.
Conclusion
We all strive as analysts to work in the depressive position, and embedded in
this listening position are so many elements best characterized by psychological
health, openness, a capacity to be realistic, and understanding work as an
ongoing process.
At root, our capacity to make use of our thoughts and feelings—working in
the countertransference—is featured in our work in the depressive position.
De Alvarez de Toledo (1996) summarizes well something that I think is the
hallmark of the depressive position: “the phenomenon of countertransference
understanding which is created by the internal verbalization of the auto-
interpretation of the countertransference, and the ensuing freeing up of the
analytic function of interpreting the situation” (p174). While an awkward
translation of English, I believe that de Alvarez de Toledo is describing a more
natural and relaxed capacity on the part of the analyst to metabolize and
transform raw elements of the patient’s communication into usable words for
the patient.
A similar version of this notion of a more natural transformation of the

patient’s communications was offered by Money-Kryle (1956), who described
the “normal” countertransference as follows: “The analyst, as it were, absorbs
the patient’s state of mind through the medium of the associations he hears and
the posture he observes, recognizes it as expressing some pattern in his own
unconscious world of phantasy, and reprojects the patient in the act of for-
mulating his interpretations” (p364).
Baranger (1993; 2009, p174), building on de Alvarez de Toledo, discusses the
analyst placing himself at the limit at which words have not yet become
detached from the emotions. This is an area between the:
processes of symbolization and learning to speak—a frontier where there is

no inflexible splitting between mind and body, between the perceived world
and the conceived one, between feelings, thoughts and actions: a world in
which an abstract utterance may be of extraordinarily concrete value, even
on the bodily level and in which words have not yet become detached from
the emotions.
This may be a particularly lonely area for the analyst when the patient is unable
to still symbolize or express himself through words. It is also easy for the ana-
lyst to move into more regressed states when he is with a patient who is unable
to use words except as concrete objects. We might refer to the analyst’s capa-
cities to work in the depressive position as involving the capacity for useful
regression in these moments. In this optimal position, the analyst’s capacity for
regression meets the patient’s inability to use words in a way that searches for
(rather than forces) the patient’s latent capacities for transformation of experi-
ence into words.
Perhaps analysts who are most able to work in the depressive position are
able to engage in not only conscious self-reflection, but also an unconscious
“understanding work” (Sandler, 1976). Sandler’s notion of “unconscious
understanding” was predicated on the assumption that we continuously scan
the reactions of others in constructing symptoms and acclimating to roles with
others. Sandler suggested that if, on the basis of such unconscious scanning,
there is no gratification of an unconscious wishful fantasy through identity of
perception, then we may discard a particular course of action in order to attain
unconscious wish fulfillment. Thus Sandler added to Freud’s notion of the
“dream-work” that we may perceive dream content and unconsciously translate
it back into its latent meaning, so that wish fulfillment is obtained by means of
identity of perception.
Sandler suggests that in a sense there is an unconscious “understanding-
work,” which goes in a parallel but opposite direction to the dream-work as
described by Freud. Sandler states that “the perceived manifest actualization is
unconsciously understood, and unconsciously translated back into its latent
meaning” (Sandler, 1976, p42). As psychoanalysts, we have learned to make use
of our own associations, self-observation, and self-analysis to gain some access

to what has been unconsciously communicated to us. Sandler suggests that we
can unconsciously read or translate the manifest derivatives of our own
unconscious wishes and fantasies and that we have the capacity to understand,
in a similar fashion and quite unconsciously, the latest meaning of much of
what is produced by others, provided that there is sufficient background simi-
larity between ourselves and the other person. Sandler is describing a kind of
unconscious self-reflection that I believe is operating quite regularly in listening
from the depressive position.

Taken together as a group of characterizations of the analyst’s work in the
depressive position, we might say that each analyst in his own way functions as
a reliable and good enough container for the patient’s mind. Patients grant us
permission to interpret what is in their mind and to tell them how we under-
stand them in our own minds. In so doing, they give us special authority to try
to show them how they dissemble and how they communicate things that they
are not aware of communicating.
Spezzano (2007) suggested that for interpretations to be mutative, the
patient’s fantasy must be one in which the analyst’s mind is a free mind. In
identification with the analyst’s free mind, the patient can imagine taking in
interpretations because they are not experienced as too rigid or controlling. If
the analyst’s mind is fantasied and experienced as a free mind, then what is
offered is something that allows interpretive play (e.g., Winnicott, 1971). These
are the circumstances in which a patient trusts the mind of the analyst. A great
deal of work often goes into developing this trust, including the ways that, over
the course of analytic work, the patient experiences the mind of the analyst as
not only and not continuously a free mind. When analysis is “good enough,”
the patient learns that the analyst is able to return to a position of listening
more in line with some of the elements of the depressive position that I have
described.
In the next chapter, I discuss a few of the many ways in which the analyst
struggles to find and re-find this position.
References
Anzieu, D. (1986). Freud’s Self-Analysis. London: Hogarth Press.
Baldwin, J. (1956). Giovanni’s Room. New York, NY: Doubleday.
Baranger, M. (1993). The mind of the analyst: From listening to interpretation. International
Baranger, W. (2009). Contradictions between theory and technique in psychoanalysis. In
L. G. Fiorini (Ed.), The work of confluence: Listening and interpreting in the
psychoanalytic field (pp. 174–xx). London: Karnac.
Bion, W. R. (1957) The differentiation of the psychotic from the non-psychotic personalities.
Bion, W. R. (1962). Learning from Experience. London: Heinemann.

Britton, R., Feldman, M., O’Shaugnessy, E., & Steiner, J. (2012) The Oedipus Complex
Today: Clinical Implications. London: Karnac Books
Buechler, S. (1998). The analyst’s experience of loneliness. Contemporary Psychoanalysis,
34: 91–113.
Cooper, S. (2000). Mutual containment in the psychoanalytic process. Psychoanalytic
Dialogues, 10: 166–189.
Cooper, S. (2010a). Self-criticism and unconscious grandiosity: Transference-counter-
transference dimension. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 91: 1115–1136.
Cooper, S.(2010b). A Disturbance in the Field: Essays in Transference-Countertransference.

Courtauld, A. (1932). Living alone under polar conditions. The Polar Record, 1(4): 66–74.
de Alvarez de Toledo, L. (1996). The analysis of “associating,” “interpreting”
and “words”: Use of this analysis to bring unconscious fantasies into the present and
to achieve greater ego integration. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 77:
291–317.
Feldman, M. (1993). The dynamics of reassurance. International Journal of Psychoanalysis,
74: 275–285.
Feldman, M. (2013). The value of uncertainty. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 82: 51–61.
Ferrante, E. (2014, November 17). Interview, Elana Ferrante. London Financial Times, px.
Freud, S. (1909). Letter to Jung, Letter 134F. In W. McGuire (Ed.), The Freud-Jung letters:
The Correspondence between Sigmund Freud and C. G. Jung (pp209–211). Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1974.
Friedman, L. (2007). The delicate balance of work and illusion in psychoanalytic.
Fromm-Reichmann, F. (1990). Loneliness. Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 26: 305–330.
Green, A. (2011). Illusions and Disillusions of Psychoanalytic Work. London: Karnac.
Harris (2009) You must remember this. Psychoanal. Dial. 19: 2–21.
Harris, A., & Sinsheimer (2008). The analyst’s vulnerability: Preserving and fine-tuning
analytic bodies. In Bodies in Treatment: The Unknown Dimension, ed. F. S. Anderson.
New York: Taylor & Francis, pp. 255–274.
Isaacs, S. (1952). The nature and function of phantasy. In M. Klein, P. Heimann,
S. Isaacs, & J. Riviere (Eds.), Developments in Psychoanalysis (pp. 62–121). London:
Hogarth Press.
Klein (1952). Some theoretical conclusions regarding the emotional life of the infant. In
M. Klein, P. Heimann, S. Isaacs, & J. Riviere (Eds.), Developments in Psychoanalysis
(pp15–39). London: Hogarth Press.
Klein, M. (1957). Envy and gratitude. In Writings of Melanie Klein (Vol. 3, pp. 176–235).
London: Hogarth Press.
Kris, A. O. (1990). Helping patients by analyzing self-criticism. Journal of the American
Psychoanalytic Association, 38: 605–636.
LaFarge, L. (2014). How and why unconscious phantasy and transference are the defining
features of psychoanalytic practice. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 95 (6):
1265–1278.
Money-Kryle, R. (1956). Normal countertransference and some of its derivatives.
Money-Kyrle, R. (1968). Cognitive development. International Journal of Psychoanalysis,
49, 61–68.
Nacht, S. (1962). The curative factors in psychoanalysis. International Journal of

Psychoanalysis, 43, 206–211.
Ogden, T. (1989). The Primitive Edge of Experience. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson.
Ogden, T. (2012). Creative Readings: Essays on Seminal Analytic Works. London: Routledge.
Palmer, J. (2015) Personal communication, June, 2015.
Sandler, J. (1976) Dreams, unconscious fantasies, and identity of perception. International
Review of Psycho-Analysis, 3: 33–42
Smith, H. (2000). Countertransference, conflictual listening, and the analytic object
relationship. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 48: 95–128.
Smith, H. (2004). The analyst’s fantasy of the ideal patient. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 73:
627–658.
Spezzano, C. (2007). A home for the mind. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 76: 1563–1583.
Steiner, J. (2011). Seeing and Being Seen: Emerging from a Psychic Retreat. London:
Routledge.
Winnicott, D. W. (1945). Primitive emotional development. In Through Paediatrics to
Psychoanalysis (145–156). New York, NY: Basic Books, 1958.
Winnicott, D. W. (1958). The capacity to be alone. International Journal of
Winnicott, D. W. (1960). Ego distortion in terms of true and false self. In The Matura-
tional Processes and the Facilitating Environment (pp40–152). London: Hogarth Press.
Winnicott, D. W. (1971). Playing and Reality. New York, NY: Basic Books.
Chapter 2
Ruin and beauty II: The analyst’s

experience and resistance to grief
and sense of limitation in the
analytic process
Each analysis that we have the privilege of “completing” involves running

up against the limitations of our own empathic and imaginative ability. The
analyst’s limitations in this regard require work on the analyst’s part to exam-
ine, question and grieve. The analyst hopefully shares and holds her patient’s
sense of accomplishment in analysis to a large extent. But not all of the progress
that we see or pleasure that we derive from this process is similar to how
the patient experiences these accomplishments. The same holds true for the
overlapping and distinct experiences of limitation or disappointment held by
the patient and analyst.
There are many sources of resistance on the part of the analyst to produc-
tively working with his feelings of incompleteness or disappointment with the
analytic process. It is his job, and he demands of himself that he can provide
something to his patients. The process of change is quite refractory to inter-
vention, and there are often many good clinical reasons for patients to hold on
to their adaptation, their own sense of internal ruin or badness, that make what
we offer enormously threatening.
I explore a few of these sources of resistance in this chapter, including the
analyst’s struggle with repetition sometimes based on grandiose fantasies that
analysis should be easier or more dramatically “successful” (this is taken up in
much more detail in Chapter 3); the analyst’s doubts about his own goodness
(e.g., persistent self-criticism); and failure to understand elements of the
patient’s envy and the analyst’s own envy of the patient.
I will also briefly explore the relationship between aesthetic experience
and experiences of grief, limitation and disappointment in the analytic process.
I especially want to explore these matters with regard to analyses that would
not be considered “failed” analyses or analyses in the termination phase but
instead are analyses that we would characterize as productive going concerns.
While termination has traditionally been the place of reviewing and speaking
more directly about what has been accomplished and what not, I want to make the
clinical case for the utility and sometimes necessity of maintaining these currents
in the mix during the analytic process.
30 Ruin and beauty II
Seeking containers for the analyst’s grief and disappointment:

Some thoughts on the aesthetics of the ruined internal situation
While analysis is filled with hope and possibility, anyone who has been living for a
while “marooned in their own skulls” (Wallace, 2001) knows that things that they
want “fixed” (Bion, 1961) will, if things go well and change occurs, not be “fixed.”
The therapeutic action and the therapeutic results that analysis offers are pointing
toward and often embedded in the depressive position. Changes will come from
within. Yes, conflicts and their attendant tension and anxiety are reduced. Object
relations, fraught with conflict and intense need, longing, guilt or envy, are modified.
However, what this ends up looking like is not always best characterized by
symptom reduction but rather that the patient is able to hold the unsettling parts
of his or her narrative in an easier position than before. Such change means a great
deal; but, more than anything, this is why psychoanalysis never had any real long-
term hope for being an extremely popular form of psychotherapy. Learning that
you are the origin of what ails you, that conflict will accompany you for the rest
of your life, and that you will find new ways to work with internal conflict is not
very sexy, even if (for we believers) it is an invigorating message and accomplishment.
Just as patients need a place to hold and contain their unsettling narrative(s),
analysts need a container for their affects, including grief and disappointment
during the analytic process, in order to be as steady an analyst as possible. The
analyst’s unsettling narrative can be really quite unsettling. After all, it is
unsettling to be in the role of helping people to change, to modify symptoms, and
to know that a substantial part of what we offer is this capacity to hold and
contain their affective and ideational experience. Yet in a sense, for analysis to
happen, there needs to be illusion, the opening up of fantasies and wishes
about what might happen. This notion is in line with Friedman’s (2007) obser-
vation that analysts conduct work that is not entirely “wholesome” (p818).
Friedman means by this expression that the trappings and setting of analysis—
the couch, the asymmetries, the nature of work with illusions about being cared
for, in addition to the ways in which we do care for our patients—are unique in
many ways to the analytic situation in relationship to other types of treatment
and other relationships. Modell (1991) was also cogent in his sense of how
idiosyncratic are the paradoxes between intimacy and restraint, real and illu-
sory forms of intimacy in the nature of analytic work.
In addition to all of the idiosyncrasies and peculiarities of our work as a
setting is the idea that what we offer is very much aligned with the notion that
grieving allows us to live. Mead (1970) put it that “Grieving is for life” (p11).
We simply cannot play, cannot imagine and enjoy, without the capacity for
engagement with others and our own minds. And we cannot live in the realm of
play without loss. The invitation to grieve as a form of treatment (other than
explicitly focused grief therapy) has at its core that to grieve is to come further
alive. This must be another element of our work that seems to many a “not
entirely healthy form of work” (Freud, 1909, p210).
Ruin and beauty II 31
Analysts also need a container for the mobilization of their own wishes and
hopes for analysis and for their grief. Our patients are partly containers for
these affects of the analyst (e.g., Cooper, 2000) as analytic work proceeds, but
only in highly problematic treatments are they the primary ways for the analyst
to hold his experiences of grief and hope. Hope relates to the ways in which the
analyst is trying to help the patient to achieve new understanding, but it threa-
tens to become malignant if it induces patient and analyst to move away too
much from what the patient’s internal struggles are about. Psychoanalytic hope
is nearly always of the kind in which grief has occurred; idealization has been
integrated with disappointment; incompleteness is conceived of as a possibility,
if not inevitable. Hope always threatens to become a nihilistic and self-defeating
path if the analytic couple’s interest in the patient’s inner life is being minimized
or neglected. Hope also threatens to involve manic flight away from the
patient’s grief and grievance—from, if you will, an internal ruined condition.
Several psychoanalysts have emphasized the relevance of the ways that we
appreciate and bear art in relationship to the depressive position. I find some of
these observations helpful in thinking about containers for the patient and
analyst in analytic work. Rilke’s (1922) famous characterization of beauty as
“nothing but the beginning of terror that we are still just able to bear” (p35)
became a launching point for contributions by both Hanns Sachs and Hanna
Segal in terms of linking the appraisal of beauty with our experiences of the
impermanence of life.
Hanns Sachs (1940) discusses the onlooker (the patient and the analyst, as it
were) as observing every work of beauty with terror related to experiences of
depression and death. Sachs argues that all works of beauty embody the terri-
fying experience of depression and death. In this way, he suggests that the
challenge for the viewer is less to understand beauty and more to bear it, and he
connects this terror with the static element in art and experience. He goes on to
link this static element with something unchangeable, eternal, in contrast to the
embedded change and impermanence in life. Segal (1952) agrees that in enjoying
and experiencing art and beauty, we must find ways to bear the inextricably
linked experience of impending loss.
Patients always have to cope with their own terror about their inner
life as they come to feel and see it in analysis as well as their experience of
how the analyst is able to contain and understand the patient’s inner life.
Patients are often quite comforted and relieved by the analyst’s ability to cope
with their terror in ways that are different than their own. Sometimes they are
made more anxious by entrusting the analyst with bearing parts of their
unconscious life.
One of the significant problems with bearing experience in psychoanalysis,
integrating new and old experience, is that it reminds us of our impermanence.
Put another way, one of the turning points in many analyses involves the
patient’s experience of sadness and loss accompanying new learning. Sometimes
the capacity for new abilities for psychic play carries with it a sense of lost
time; sometimes there is sadness summarized by the question/statement: “So,

that’s all there is? I have to bear this? This is as good as it gets?”
Levine (2003) has suggested that an element of gratification in analytic work
relates to the process of creating meaning; coherence then becomes a kind of
aesthetic object for the analyst in addition to its utility in helping a patient to
understand what he or she is communicating. In this sense, our theory and the
actual or temporary coherence that it provides helps us to contain and bear our
patient’s experience and our own.
I find it useful to think of the patient and analyst as collaborative artists,

psychic boundary artists in exploring the patient’s mind (see Chapter 7). Both
artists, the patient and analyst, are struggling to bear the patient’s art, including
the patient’s fantasies, conflicts, his internalized ruin, his hopes, wishes, and
conflicts through the process of free association and meaning making. The
analyst might be thought of as a viewer/container in the analytic situation, which
is helping the patient to contain and cultivate a capacity to view his mind/affect/
creations as art. The analyst’s associative processes and resistance to association
help to elaborate what the patient’s art is suggesting. Winnicott (1971) would
characterize this process as in line with helping patients to develop their capacity
for play. This kind of play is created through the patient, the analyst, and a
third view comprised of their joint understanding (e.g., Ogden, 2004).
In the remainder of this chapter, I would like to turn to some of the most
frequent obstacles for the analyst in bearing the patient’s art: the areas of the
analyst’s need for competence as well as his or her greed, envy, grandiosity,
omnipotence and self-criticism.
Some of the analyst’s obstacles to working in the depressive

position: Bearing repetition and the patient’s internal objects
Many analysts have noted the co-existence and interplay of primitive and heal-
thy levels of organization in the personality of all of us, patients and analysts.
While most of these insights are directed toward understanding patients, it
seems to me that they apply equally to the mind of the analyst. For example,
Isaacs (1952) conceptualized the unconscious as containing both primitive and
more mature types of symbolizing and thinking. As Ogden (2012) suggested,
Isaacs in many ways foreshadowed important contributions of Bion regarding
the interplay of the paranoid-schizoid position (Bion, 1962) and coexistence of
psychotic and non-psychotic parts of the personality (Bion, 1957) in both heal-
thy and pathological states. The analyst’s obstacles in clinical work and parti-
cularly regarding working with his patient are in part a result of this dialectical
interplay within his own personality between the paranoid-schizoid and
depressive position.
Britton et al. (2012) have also stated that the depressive position, like the
Oedipus situation, is never completed. Instead, each new life circumstance
requires us to rework our relationship to the depressive position in new stages
of development and in every new life situation. This basic insight is, of course,
relevant to analysts in the course of their work, just as it helps us to understand
the challenges of our patients.
Naturally, in the course of analytic work, many of the problems relate to the
analyst’s resistance to new understanding and the disruption of newly achieved
levels of understanding. There is comfort in actual understanding, in our
attempts at understanding, and the illusion of understanding. Bion (1959)
documented our reliance of selective pieces of information. Britton (1998) ela-
borated how new understanding in the analytic situation, and indeed in general
within the scientific world, threatens our security partly because it reveals our
ignorance and challenges our conscious and unconscious sense of omnipotence.
Britton contends that it also mobilizes a latent sense of hatred of all things new
and foreign that threaten our sense of omnipotence.
Britton (1998) describes the Kleinian characterization of the depressive posi-
tion as arising naturally in infancy as a consequence of the child’s developing
capacities to recognize, mark, recall and anticipate experience. In the process,
existing levels of awareness are disrupted in the infant’s psychic world. In the
developing depressive position of the infant, previously separate worlds of
blissful, idealized experience are accompanied by a sense of the world as frigh-
tening or potentially persecutory. Our complex world that contains goodness
and terror becomes gradually better held by the infant and child.
I appreciate this element of our functioning so usefully emphasized in Freud
and especially Fairbairn, yet I do not agree entirely with Britton’s notion that
we exclusively hate newness and foreignness. I believe that we hold ambivalence
in this regard. I find myself much more convinced by Winnicott’s (1969) notion
that we both hate and feel compelled to explore reality. Winnicott referred to
our instinctive curiosity as “positive aggression” that co-exists alongside our
feelings of hatred for newness, and this seems much closer to my experience of
patients’ experiences of new insight and exploration. What I like about Winni-
cott’s elaboration of what he termed positive aggression is that he didn’t
entirely dispense with our reluctance to embrace reality at the same time that
we hate it. In other words, Winnicott viewed our embrace of reality in the
context of both the needs to let in the object world after our omnipotence has
yielded to reality as well as embracing our curiosity and interest in the object
world as expressed by developmental motility itself. More than just a political
compromise to reconcile Freudian and Kleinian notions of our instinctual
hatred of reality with Fairbairn’s object relations theory that proposed an
instinct to embrace reality and objects, I view Winnicott as intuiting the child’s
actual ambivalence about newness and otherness.
Nevertheless, much of our body of psychoanalytic writing has beneficially
understood the side of our patients that resist newness and change, constantly
at play in the analyst’s struggles with patience and forbearance in his listening.
This takes many forms, including the difficulty to bear repetition and the fan-
tasy and wish that analytic work could more easily create change. For example,
Smith (2004) suggested that each of us holds conscious and unconscious

fantasies about an idealized patient. Often, part of the analyst’s resistance to
analytic work involves tacit and explicit comparisons between our actual and
idealized patient. Smith makes the very useful point that “it is in the dynamic
tension between the analyst’s fantasy of the ideal patient and his or her
experience of the actual patient that analysis begins to emerge” (p633). Cooper
(2010b) also explored the ways in which the analyst’s anticipatory fantasies
about where analytic work (and even specific sessions) might go often reflect
obstacles to analytic work. In turn, making use of these anticipatory fantasies

or becoming aware of embedded fantasies of idealized patients is often quite
helpful over the course of analytic work.
No matter how much we know that these kinds of fantasies may run counter
to analytic ideals, they are inevitable. The primary ideal that these fantasies are
in conflict with is the understanding that our patient is doing the best that he is
able to do. We struggle as analysts with the wish that the other conform to our
own ideals and fantasies, just as the patient struggles with both his own fanta-
sies about the wish to change and his unconscious wish to stay the same.
Perhaps it could be said that the analyst’s fantasies about analytic patients
extend to our fantasies about the analytic process. Levine (2003) has suggested
that there is a great deal of pleasure in the aesthetic experience of analysis
comprised of the movement from less to more coherence. She argues that
coherence in analytic work is as much the aesthetic object as the content and
narrative itself. Levine suggests that there may well be an intrinsic gratification
for analysts in understanding narratives through psychoanalytic theory. While
these processes are important to understand, I would suggest that at extreme
levels, the analyst’s involvement with the aesthetic beauty of psychoanalytic
theory or the capacity for theory to help us understand carries the danger that
the analyst is becoming more involved with the beauty of theory than the ruin
of the patient’s internalized world. To be sure, though, patients also find relief
and gratification in new ways of understanding the unsettling narratives that
they have not been able to contain or make sense of prior to work with their
analyst. I have even wondered if at times psychoanalysis has minimized how
helpful intellectualized formulations are to our patients during the analytic
process. It is also true that our theory itself sometimes comforts the analyst in
helping her to understand the patient’s internalized world.
To the extent that we are always in some sense negotiating with our capa-
cities to integrate the loss of idealized self and other experiences and repre-
sentations, our analytic listening is reflective of compromise between the
depressive and paranoid positions. Smith (2004) usefully pointed out that analysts
need to work with the affects that we might feel about the conflict between the
patient’s internal representation of the analyst and the analyst’s self-representation.
Often, the discrepancy between transference reactions to the analyst and the
analyst’s experience of himself as an object to the patient can be one of the
most challenging elements of analytic work, particularly for patients who are at
times quite unaware of the discrepancies for themselves. At its core, this dis-
crepancy gets at what makes the transference so difficult to comprehend, both
when it is unconsciously and consciously expressed and enacted (Bird, 1971;
Cooper, 2010a, 2010b).
Thus, one of the major “symptoms” of the analyst’s resistance to working
with his actual rather than idealized patient is in the analyst’s rejection of the
everyday and ordinary in analytic work, namely repetition. Britton quotes a
lovely passage from Wordsworth’s (1804) ode “Intimations of Immortality from
Recollections of Early Childhood”: “to find strength in what remains behind

when Nothing can bring back the hour/Of splendor in the grass, of glory in the
flower” (p302). Wordsworth captures the conflict at the heart of the depressive
position, namely to accept rather than reject the goodness of the quotidian in
life when set against the memories of a lost, idealized world.
The following brief example of Sarah puts into focus some of the obstacles to
working with repetition and the internal object. I provide another more exten-
ded example of this problem in the next chapter with the case of Kate. The
patient’s terror is largely unconscious, directed toward the fear of a non-self—a
non-self that I never actually felt in relationship to the patient but that the
patient felt a conviction about possessing and conveying to others. I did, how-
ever, experience her terror in ways that she was only gradually able to experi-
ence more consciously. Sarah’s experience of terror was actually so muted and
obscured through her devalued self that at times it felt deadening. In fact,
Sarah’s conviction that she was nothing at times concealed to her the reasons
that she had sought analysis.
I worked with Sarah for many years in analysis, during which much of the
time she tried to convince me that her self was nonexistent. Sarah argued that she
was the combination of the most challenging parts of each of her parents. Sarah’s
mother deferred to her father and hated herself despite her successful career and
significant friendships. Her mother would sit for hours in front of the mirror
prior to her parents’ many social engagements feeling that everything about her
facial features and dresses was flawed. Sarah would watch her mother, whom
she admired, and become sad and confused when, despite much encouragement
from Sarah, her mother persisted in her continuous self-reproach. As Sarah
became older, she knew that her mother persisted in this behavior but became
more annoyed by it and felt helpless as she gradually withdrew from these
scenarios with her mother. Sarah’s father was a highly self-involved man who
preached to his two children Vince Lombardi’s famous phrase, “winning isn’t
everything, it’s the only thing.” She felt that her father cared less about whether she
learned her school materials and much more about her test scores. He also
advanced a kind of “corporate motto” (Symington, 1983) within the family
that getting ahead was far more important than engagement with others or
self-satisfaction.
Sarah’s ideals were corrupted by her father’s relentless advocacy for material
success, but she began an analysis upon completing college when she had
already begun feeling somewhat disillusioned with him. She began analysis
quite convinced that her father was correct, but she also sensed that his ideals
were bankrupt. The problem was that Sarah was convinced that she was
nothing but the sum of her highly successful performance. She felt that she had
learned little in high school or college despite being a stellar student in terms of
her grades and external accomplishments.
Sarah’s rejection of her mind was always set against an ego ideal (Bibring,
1964) that she could not live up to. She partly wished for me to tell her what to
do, as her father had repeatedly done. She often felt lost without his guidance
and judgment and mine in the transference, even though it felt like a nihilistic
and completely unacceptable solution and repetition.
Through analytic work and development, Sarah was able to become separate
enough from her family’s set of ideals, but she became significantly depressed
with a feeling that there was “no there there” regarding her self. She continually
made the case that without her façade and experience of falseness she had little
to show. I often thought about her fear of a non-self as partly involving an
identification with her mother, a way of holding on to her. In her analysis, she
would appeal to me by telling me about some of her taste in music and novels
to show how her tastes were plebian, sensing that these choices would likely
not appeal to me. In a sense, she was trying to make the argument that the most
artistic, beautiful expressions of her selfhood had to do with her collusive
arrangements with her father and that she was otherwise soulless. She felt liked
by her friends and was developing more closeness with a man who eventually
became her husband, but she persisted in feeling that there was nothing really
loveable about her except her capacity to perform for those she liked. Sarah’s
conclusion was that the banality of her aesthetic preferences supported this
argument.
I had what I found to be interesting reactions/interpretations of her con-
structions. One was that as an analyst, I obviously try not to truck in assessing
my patient’s aesthetic choices as much as understanding what they might mean.
I did, however, find it curious that she was interested in some of the most pop
types of music, often that which would appeal to a 12-year-old girl in contrast
to a 25-year-old woman. I began to associate to my patient as inviting me into a
familiar internalized scenario in which, at the time of early adolescence, her
father was constantly monitoring her tastes and choices. I was invited to pass
judgment on her choices or, perhaps looked at from the point of view involving
seeking new experience, to endorse in some new way her freedom to choose,
despite whether I liked her choices or not. She was feeling that her younger self
was unacceptable and would invite her father’s campaign to persuade her
against choices that did not fit into his corporate ideals for the family. I thought
that what might be the familiar type of object relationship was to endorse
convention and acclimate to the culture, but that this old object allegiance
might be colliding with elements of her awareness of me not as the internally
held object.
One of the major features of her free associative style was to constantly feel
that what was on her mind was too banal, too superficial, not smart enough, or
a “waste of time.” Sarah was unable to see the art in her little girl self because
this was associated for her father with slothful, wasteful, “hippy” taste, which
from what we could gather was too commonplace. Falseness became fetishized;
without it, she felt lost unless she could repeatedly invite me into perverse sce-
narios in which I might affirm that her self was inadequate and needed to be
shored up. Through repeated instances of these types of invitations, we were
able to see how much she was frightened of her self-productions.

Sarah began to see how persistent were her wishes that I direct her or eval-
uate her choices, condemn them or approve them. But there was what seemed
like, in Rosenfeld’s (1987) terms, “endless repetition of these scenarios.” I had
periods of time in which I wondered and doubted whether Sarah would ever be
able to make use of me except to invite me into these scenarios.
Gradually, through a process of mourning, she felt encouraged that her tastes
could have their day in her analysis. Mourning was partly related to the sense
of emptiness and aloneness that she felt without her father’s and my evaluation.
She really wasn’t sure what she had without a sense of evaluation. She also
mourned her mother’s deep sense of insecurity and depression, which she had
steadfastly, unconsciously held onto as a form of being connected to her. Sarah
shifted from massive self-reproach about a lack of self or, in her own view, her
banal sensibility to sadness and grief about not being nurtured for her own
tastes. Her sadness often moved quickly into mild anger toward her mother’s
passivity and compliance and rage about her father’s need to control her as an
extension of him. Through repeated fluctuations between grief and anger (e.g.,
Kris, 1984), she was eventually able to better accept her own mind as a source
of pleasure and gratification.
For example, in a series of sessions over a long period of time, something
quite interesting happened related to what seemed like highly repetitive dreams.
Sarah’s masturbatory fantasies had taken a different turn after a few years of
analysis and a few years with her very loving boyfriend. These fantasies used to
begin with a feeling of being degraded and then excited to now something
about herself as mysterious to a man leading to sexual excitement. In the fan-
tasy, the man and sometimes a woman would be captivated by her and would
say some variation on, “Who are you?” She sometimes said to me with laughter
in reporting these fantasies, “I’m a woman of mystery.” We understood some of
this in the transference as related to a set of wishes with me and experiences of
me as seeing her, approaching her as a woman of mystery with a mind that was
not already known by either of us. Dreams recurred that had been present ear-
lier in her analysis in which she was dressed in costumes, for sometimes unex-
plained reasons and contexts sometimes for Halloween parties, sometimes as a
prelude to something sexual. We had earlier thought of these dreams through
her and my constrained associations as part of her feeling that she had to be
chameleon-like to please her father and men, malleable and shape-shifting. She
had also invariably associated to her mother’s painful and sad time spent with
Sarah trying on dress after dress before going to a party or having friends to
their home. While the dream content was similar and repetitive, her affect was
different in this version of the dreams. Now, she felt her dressing up and costumes
in the dreams as an erotically stimulating feeling about being mysterious. She could
more playfully engage with the idea of being or pretending to be mysterious and
that, as I put it to her, there was more to her than met the eye.
An obvious problem related to the analyst’s capacity to work with repetition,
limitation and grief is to what extent for each analyst the patient is a narcis-
sistic extension of the analyst. We have all heard about some analysts in our
field who have conveyed to patients that they are not analyzable either early on
in treatment or after a long period of time. These contexts are too varied to
address easily. For example, there are patients for whom transference so easily
moves into psychotic transference that analysis may not be the most useful form
of treatment. But there are other situations in which it is likely that there is a
premature giving up on the work in the context of particularly thorny trans-
ference configurations. Just as long stalemated analyses may involve an avoid-
ance of grief, so too early decisions to stop and give up may also involve an
avoidance of working with limitation and grief. In the latter instances, what is
sometimes avoided is a scenario in which the patient’s progress might not be
what either analyst or patient was hoping for. Instead, a pressure for some
prematurely finalized evaluation takes precedence over seeing analytic work as a
still ongoing process. Most often, it is our patients who become disillusioned in
these contexts rather than the analyst. Many analysts have worked with
patients in analysis who feel such enormous pressure to live up to their own
expectations of progress that they are unable to sustain the process after rela-
tively short periods of analytic work.
The patient’s and analyst’s envy

Another major source of the analyst’s resistance to the depressive position is his
difficulty working with his patient’s envy and sometimes her own envy of the
patient. There have been many valuable post-Klein contributions related to the
patient’s envy of the analyst (e.g., Boris, 1994; Etchegoyen et al., 1987; Ger-
hardt, 2009; Spillius, 1993). My brief focus in this part of the chapter will be on
the analyst’s resistance to working with elements of his own envy of the patient
when it arises.
The analyst’s disappointment in the analytic process is often related to
wishes to feel oneself as a usable, serviceable object that is in competition with
the patient’s internal objects. These internal objects are forcefully and relent-
lessly being communicated over the course of analytic process. The problems
here may involve lack of humility on the part of the analyst or lack of imagi-
nation in dedicated listening to the unfolding of internal objects. Analysts may
also envy the patient’s opportunity for improvement if the analyst has
unresolved wishes for the kind of analyst the analyst aims to be. The analyst may
not have worked out a good enough relationship to his own depressive elements.
Patients who want the analyst to do something to take away their pain or
help them change more radically than is occurring, and analysts who believe
that they are not doing enough, are especially prone to problems in grieving the
analytic situation. Schafer (2003) emphasized that some patients need to ruin
analytic work; that highly self-critical analysts are particularly susceptible to
such patients; and that we are sometimes too focused on our own self-esteem
problems or our irritability. He stated:
The biggest hazard that I have noted in my work as analyst and supervisor
lies in the analyst’s doubts about his or her own goodness as a person and
analyst. We analysts all experience these doubts, some of us more often and
more severely than others. These doubts are there to be played on by the
envious analysand, that is, the analysand who is intent on spoiling the
experience of rendering good analytic care and understanding that is in
keeping with our work ideals and humanistic values. In this context, either
spontaneously or reactively, we can lose sight of our reparative goodness
and lose the poise and confidence necessary to discern and take up calmly
the analysand’s envy and projected envy (Schafer, 2003, p67).
Short of the envious patient, many patients become understandably angry,

questioning, and skeptical about the level of repetition and slow pace of analy-
tic work. It is difficult for many analysts to bear up against this kind of attack,
and it feeds on the analyst’s own doubts about the nature of analytic work and
about his own ability.
All of these make for interference with our understanding of resistances to
listening to our patient and to the capacity to honor the depressive position in a
more genuine way. What this means is that we each have a fantasy about ana-
lysis and about therapeutic action—how it will go. This fantasy is operating at
times and sometimes being levied by the analyst against the patient’s and ana-
lyst’s actual behavior and performance. In this context, these fantasies can be
persecutory, resulting in conscious and unconscious blaming of either the
patient or analyst. Sometimes the analys’s idealizing transferences to the patient
unconsciously require that the patient uphold the ideals that the analyst holds
toward her or him. In my sobering opinion, these aren’t just possibilities but
occur more frequently than analysts acknowledge. These are eventualities at
different times in analysis, and the question is to what extent does this kind of
persecutory application of ideals for analytic change become dominant. This
includes many other patterns—envy of the patient, idealization, overriding
attraction and manic flight, and eroticism cloaking aggression from either side,
patient and analyst.
While likely not a very common occurrence, there are several ways that
analysts may experience envy toward their patients during particular points of
analysis and often feel guilt about such envy. One source of envy results from the
success in the analytic process and takes the form of the analyst’s envy of the
patient’s ability to successfully work in analysis or to receive help (see Schafer,
2003; and Chapter 3 in this volume in the work with Kate). We might usefully
refer to this experience as the analyst’s envy of the patient’s analyst (Schafer,
2003; Pang, personal communication). I find it useful to state it in this way (the
analyst’s envy of the patient’s analyst) because this language gets at the ways in
which the analyst is trying to become more self-reflective about the various
potential meanings of this countertransference and the analyst’s fantasies about

the analysis or his own previous personal analysis. For example, some analysts
harbor feelings and especially fantasies about what they’d wished for in their
own analysis in ways that might generate interference in helping the patient to
understand his or her wishes, fantasies and conflict. These fantasies often work
in the way that nostalgia operates to transform a story in the present to a
rewritten narrative of the past. Psychoanalysts project fantasies onto the analytic
situation based on their countertransference to the analytic process and to the
patient. These fantasies cluster at different points in our careers and lives.
When I have had fantasies about having me as my analyst, I usually become
aware that this also involves a fantasy of who I am as an analyst. I try to
understand that fantasy and why I might be having it now in the particular
clinical context in which it occurs. I also sometimes think of my previous fail-
ures and limitations as an analyst, which come into play in my work. I think
that the most interesting question is why I might be having a fantasy such as
this now, in the particular moment in which it occurs. As I try to illustrate in
the case of Kate in Chapter 3, the analyst’s envy of the patient’s analyst is often
a result of his own failure to grieve and mourn his own analysis, and these
issues are sometimes activated as we conduct analytic work. I have also come to
the sad acknowledgment that what I envied is often not primarily the patient’s
analyst but that I could have been a patient who made use of his analyst in the
way that my patient is able to make use of me. In this condition, the analyst is
likely to feel the repository of regret or sadness that he might hold about either
his own limitations as an analyst or as a patient in his analysis. And, of course,
in these moments of regret, the analyst is often blaming himself about not being
a patient who lives up to his fantasy of being a patient while forgetting that he
as patient, like all patients, was doing the best that he was able.
The analyst’s envy of the patient’s analyst (herself or himself) is also often
based on real perceptions of what the analyst has been able to give the patient
that he wasn’t able to receive in his own analysis as well as fantasies of what
we are providing the patient. Some of these fantasies relate to identification
with the patient. Many analysts go into this profession partially in order to heal
themselves so the grieving of analysis may be related to a very direct and
primitive anxiety about hope, loss and disillusionment.
One might say that these kinds of experiences of envy toward the patient
show us how much psychoanalysis can become an arena for the analyst’s grief
about his own analysis or analyses—in essence, about his own limitations and
those who have helped him such as parents or analysts. But more than any-
thing, the analyst’s envy of the patient’s analyst involves a resistance to griev-
ing, particularly when it seems that the analyst’s own analysis is featured. Like
any form of countertransference, the analyst needs to be as aware as possible of
a parasitic relationship to his patient.
There is little doubt that often the analyst’s envy of the patient’s progress
involves elements of manic defense in the face of slow progress or repetition. It
is easy to feel exhilarated or happy with our new insights and offerings for our
patients, some of which are substantially helpful to the patient. Others, however,
are but part of our long-term process of helping our patients to work better with
their inner life. O’Shaughnessy (1992), Feldman (1997), and Rosenfeld (1987) have
helped us to understand that there is often a discrepancy or lag between our sense
of provision and competence and what we are actually providing.
Harris (2009) has also usefully pointed to some of the ways in which the
analyst may envy the patient for elements of the patient’s relative freedom.
Again, we are often dealing as much with the analyst’s fantasies about the
patient’s freedom as anything else. These fantasies are always important to try
to understand in relationship to what the patient carries inside. Harris focuses
in particular on the patient’s freedom to be expressive, wild and beastly. As she
points out, many analysts begin their analytic careers in childhood by acting
precociously parental with their caretakers. In some ways, these children feel
interrupted in their experience of “the wilderness of childhood” (Chabon, 2009,
p11). Thus, there are often remnants of longings to be able to take for granted
their parents’ forbearance and patience, to be impossible, to be angry, or to
express desire in ways that were inhibited in childhood. The analyst’s inhibi-
tions, then, lay dormant, waiting to be activated, sometimes through envy of
the patient’s freedom to simply say what comes to mind. A strong relative of
this envy of the patient’s freedom to say what comes to mind is the envy that I
will discuss in Chapter 4: the freedom to feel or take for granted that there is
another person in the analyst who wishes for the patient to be able to do this.
Here, the longing for self-experience and for a specific kind of loving object are
often merged.
Seen from this perspective, analysts maintain adaptive afflictions in which
perspicacity and ability to understand are coupled with inhibition as part of
their craft. But the analyst’s envy of the parts of the patient that are less
inhibited is nearly always a source of resistance to both grieving his own losses
and thus helping the patient with his own grief. The analyst needs to gain
purchase on these envious feelings in order to make the analysis of his patient
just that—an analysis of the patient. To work and provide what he has avail-
able to give, the analyst needs to transform his envy into a capacity to mourn
what he feels he has lost. Often, these feelings of envy are based on a fantasy of
what might have been, operating in much the same way that is captured in the
universality stated by Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront: “I could have been a
contender” (Kazan, 1954). Whatever the origin of these preoccupations of the

analyst, the patient is often attuned to the analyst’s internal object world, as so
aptly pointed out by Winnicott (e.g., 1945, 1954).
In trying to understand more about the analyst’s envy of the patient and what
may interfere at time with working in the depressive position, I would like to turn
again to Hanna Segal’s (1952) paper “A Psycho-Analytical Approach to Aesthetics.”
Her remarkably powerful paper aimed to help understand what underlies artistic
motivation and what inhibits it as well. Segal’s observations have implications
for helping us to understand elements of the depressive position in analytic work

and, more especially, in the context of the analyst’s and patient’s envy.
Segal takes up the philosopher Dilthy, and his discussion of a concept called
nach-erleben. The concept translates to something like being able to understand
another by trying to reconstruct their mental and emotional state. In other
words, according to Dilthy and Segal, we live after them (the other), we re-live
them. Being able to understand another is, in a certain sense, the equivalent of
unconscious identification. Segal assumes that this kind of unconscious re-living
of the creator’s state of mind is the foundation of all aesthetic pleasure.
I assume that unconscious re-living is also a substantial basis of under-
standing and empathy in psychoanalysis. The analyst is often (if not always) in
the process of “reliving” or living after the patient. Yet while it is the privilege for
the analyst to be in this position, it also doesn’t preclude that the analyst might
also envy that in analytic time, as it were, his patient is living while the analyst
is re-living. In these instances, the patient becomes the envied source; the well-
spring of energy, desire, hostility or sexuality, not unlike the envious or insecure
Oedipal parent might feel toward her child. At its worst, the analyst needs her
patient in a more parasitic manner. These are all a particular variety of what
might be called elements of the analyst’s paranoid position that keep him from
knowing and helping his patient. When the analyst feels more pervasively a
sense of envy, analysis is doomed in contrast to momentary elements of passing
feelings and associations that are often very useful opportunities for association
and meaning for the analyst.
As is clear, in these moments of envy, the analyst has far more a fantasy of
the patient than a picture of the patient’s assemblage of internalized objects, his
sources of pain and conflict. With all due respect to how difficult it is to be an
analyst, it is much harder to be a patient than an analyst. The freedom to be a
patient and to explore the wilderness of childhood offers much opportunity for
play, but it is fraught with potentially painful memory and lived experience
during the analytic process. In the context of the analyst’s envy of the patient’s
freedom, the analyst is often viewing the patient in a highly selective manner
that eliminates the perilous and violent dangers of the wilderness.
Perhaps even more distorted is the idea that the patient is actually having the
opportunity for singularly spontaneous experience in the wilderness of free
association. It is, after all, primarily the patient who is re-living. The patient is
very much in the position that the art critic Clive Bell (1914) described the
artist: “The artist is not trying to produce pretty or even beautiful form, he is
engaged in the most important task of re-creating his ruined internal world and
the resulting form will depend on how well he succeeds in his task” (p33).
Thus, the artist/patient is also recreating experience in ways that partly overlap
with the artist/analyst. In Segal’s (1952) terms, satisfactory experiences of art
are partly achieved by a realization and sublimation of the depressive position,
and that the effect on the audience is that they unconsciously re-live the artist’s
experience and share his triumph of achievement and his final detachment. The
patient works toward achieving this position in relationship to his inner life and
to his psychological history that constitutes his inner life. The analyst’s re-living
occurs in the context of the patient’s efforts to communicate this history so that
the analyst might be able to say something to the patient that the patient did
not already know he was saying.
Embedded in this kind of fantasy of the patient as he who is to be envied, the
analyst has constructed his patient more in line with a paranoid than depressive
frame. As Harris so eloquently put it, the analyst’s ego precocity is sometimes
at odds with the patient’s increasing freedom. The patient becomes the longed
for self who has freedom and the envied other who reminds him of what he
doesn’t have or has not yet been able to accomplish.
As is nearly always the case in these matters, the analyst’s psychological pri-
vileges related to his early life, his opportunity for his own analysis, and his
own opportunity for living are the most helpful tool in his capacity for concern
for his patient as well as bearing his envy of the patient. As I pursue in Chapter 3,
these feelings of envy are nearly always based on fantasies about the patient’s
opportunity for “living” in analysis. It is not easy to be a patient, in many ways
not enviable at all. Similarly, as I tried to emphasize in that discussion, these
views of ourselves as such powerful and effective analysts whom we wish we had
as analysts are also often inflated and grandiose. These fantasies are usually based
on repositories of idealized and unintegrated views of earlier objects and parts of
our own analyses that have the potential to invade our analytic listening and, in
stops and starts, interfere with our capacity to work in the depressive position.
Obviously, patients experience and come to know the analyst’s ability to
work with his own sense of incompleteness and his own capacity to accept
what is good enough inside him and others. Patients sense our actual equani-
mity and they sense our “false self” if you will in relationship to the depressive
position. Patients are concerned about the analyst’s mind as a container for the
patient’s mind. Many different analysts from different orientations are con-
cerned in their interpretations with how patients experience the analyst’s mind
as a container for the patient’s mind. More than anything, I think that this
overlaps with what Nacht (1962) referred to as the analyst’s inner attitude. This
inner attitude is, paradoxically, not just about the patient’s experience of whom
we are as human beings, but how that human being is able to do the job of
being an analyst. If the patient senses postured equanimity that is not based on
the analyst having reached his own levels of patience, calm and the capacity to
accept the limitations of analytic work, then he is unable to feel the analyst as
an alive and helping agent for change.
References
Bell, C. (1914). Art. London: Frederick A. Stokes Company Publishers.
Bibring, G. L. (1964). Some considerations considering the ego ideal in the psycho-
analytic process. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 12: 517–521.
Bion, W. R. (1957). The differentiation of the psychotic from the non-psychotic person-
alities. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 38: 266–275.
Bion, W. R. (1959). Attacks on linking. In Second Thoughts (pp93–109). London:
Karnac, 1984.
Bion, W. R. (1961). Experiences in Groups. London: Tavistock.
Bion, W. R. (1962). Learning from Experience. London: Heinemann.
Bird, B. (1971). Notes on transference: Universal phenomenon and hardest part of ana-
lysis. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 20: 267–301.
Boris, H. (1994). Envy. New York: Jason Aronson.
Britton, R. (1998). Belief and Imagination. London: Routledge.
Britton, R., Feldman, M., O’Shaugnessy, E., & Steiner, J. (2012). The Oedipus Complex
Today: Clinical Implications. London: Karnac Books.
Chabon, M. (2009, July 16). Manhood for amateurs: The wilderness of childhood. New
York Review of Books, pp11–14.
Cooper, S. (2000). Mutual containment in the psychoanalytic process. Psychoana Dial,
10: 166–189.
Cooper, S. (2010a). Self-criticism and unconscious grandiosity: Transference-
countertransference dimension. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 91:
1115–1136.
Cooper, S. (2010b). A Disturbance in the Field: Essays in Transference-Counter-
transference. London: Routledge.
Etchegoyen, M., Lopez, M., & Rabih, M. (1987). On envy and how to interpret it.
Feldman, M. (1997). Projective identification: The analysts’ involvement. International
Freud, S. (1909). Letter to Jung, Letter 134F. In W. McGuire (Ed.), The Freud-Jung
Letters: The Correspondence between Sigmund Freud and C. G. Jung (pp209–211).
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974.
Friedman, L. (2007).The delicate balance of work and illusion in psychoanalytic. Psy-
choanalytic Quarterly, 76: 817–833.
Gerhardt, J. (2009). The roots of envy: The unaesthetic experience of the tantalized/dis-
possessed self. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 19: 267–293.
Harris, A. (2009). “You must remember this…” Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 19: 2–21.
Isaacs, S. (1952). The nature and function of phantasy. In M. Klein, P. Heimann, S. Isaacs, &
J. Riviere (Eds.), Developments in Psychoanalysis (pp62–121). London: Hogarth Press.
Kazan, E. (Director). (1954). On the Waterfront [Motion picture]. United States:
Columbia Pictures.
Kris, A. O. (1984). The conflicts of ambivalence. Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 39:
213–234.
Levine, S. (2003). Beauty treatment: The aesthetics of the psychoanalytic process.

Mead, M. (1970) Culture and Commitment. The New Relations between the
Generations in the 1970s. New York: Columbia University Press.
Modell, A. H. (1991). The therapeutic relationship as paradoxical experience.
Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 1: 13–28.
Nacht, S. (1962). The curative factors in psychoanalysis. International Journal of
Ogden, T. (2004). The analytic third: Implications for psychoanalytic theory and
technique. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 73: 167–196.

Ogden, T. (2012). Creative Readings: Essays on Seminal Analytic Works. London:
Routledge.
Rilke, R. (1922). Duino elegies. New York, NY: Caranet Press.
Rosenfeld, H. (1987). Impasse and interpretation: Therapeutic and Anti-Therapeutic
Sachs, H. (1940). Beauty, life and death. American Imago, 1: 81–133.
Segal, H. (1952). A psycho-analytical approach to aesthetics. International Journal of
627–658.
Spillius, E. B. (1993). Varieties of envious experience. International Journal of Psycho-
analysis, 74: 1199–1212.
Symington, N. (1983). The analyst’s act of freedom as agent of therapeutic change.
International Review of Psycho-analysis, 10: 283–291.
Winnicott, D. W. (1945). Primitive emotional development. In Through Paediatrics to
Psychoanalysis (145–156). New York, NY: Basic Books, 1958.
Winnicott, D. W. (1954). The depressive position in normal emotional development. In
Through Paediatrics to Psychoanalysis (pp262–277). New York, NY: Basic Books,
1958.
Winnicott, D. W.(1969). The use of an object. International Journal of Psychoanalysis,
50: 711–716.
Wordsworth, W. (1804). Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.
London: Hardpress Publishing (2012).
Chapter 3
The melancholic errand of

psychoanalysis: Exploring the
analyst’s “good enough”
experiences of repetition
A familiar feeling comes up in the supervision groups I’ve participated in over

the years (both as listener and presenter) and with supervisees when they talk to
me about fairly well developed analyses. It features a feeling of compassion and
appreciation for their analysands, the bearing of repetition combined with a
sense of mild frustration about the wish that change might occur more easily.
Repetition is bedrock. It marks the crime scene if you will—the place where
something happened to the patient and he or she figured out something to do
about it. The patient is trying to mitigate pain while often inflicting a new
version on the self. Repetition is the stratagem for coping with and covering up
what is raw and unintegrated. It’s where something had to be cauterized. It is
how we try to solve the problem by staying the same. Repetition sometimes
simultaneously marks and obscures the patient’s and analyst’s dissociation. It is
the scene for patient and analyst where they are able to be the least imaginative
and most imaginative in how they work together. How do we as an analyst find
a position in between the capacity to bear what we experience as repetitive and
a willingness and non-complacency to see something new when it’s there to see?
As you all know, Freud saw in his grandson Ernst’s little game of dis-
appearance and return, the symbolic representation of the renunciation of
instinctual satisfaction, for in this game Ernst found a way to allow his mother
to leave without protesting. In managing the distress he experienced in his
mother’s absences, he turned passive into active and symbolically took revenge
on his mother for leaving him: “All right, then, go away! I don’t need you. I’m
sending you away myself.” Freud saw in the game of tossing away the reel, a
symbolized mother, and then bringing it back, a situation (abandonment) that
was clearly unpleasant but was repeated over and over again, similar to many
neurotic behaviors. Using this observation, Freud (1920) provided insight into
the nature of the repetition compulsion and behaviors motivated by something
“beyond the pleasure principle.”
In this chapter I take up a few matters related to the analyst’s experiences of
working with repetition, especially some forms of our countertransference
resistance as well as its rich pleasures. How do we understand its varieties of
interpersonal meaning such as the patient’s unconscious probes to see how the
The melancholic errand of psychoanalysis 47
analyst withstands particular kinds of wishes and needs; tests to see whether we
succumb to unconsciously proscribed role responsive inducements? In the fort-
da game in analysis, there is a patient with a tendency toward repetition, repe-
tition that brooks no nonsense, and a very human and limited analyst trying to
make sense of repetition, bear it, and see if a slightly different personal narra-
tive of experience and conflict might emerge.
As analysts, we have long been focused on the importance of helping to
develop our patients’ capacity to mourn in the analytic process and to accept
conflict and incompleteness, hallmarks of the depressive position. It is a curious

matter that we have had relatively less to say in our ongoing work (apart from
termination) about the analyst’s experience of repetition, and its accompanying
challenges of patience and potential disappointment, in the analytic situation.
Along these lines, I hope that the issues that I discuss raise several interesting
questions related to educating analysts. As supervisors and teachers, how much
do we teach analysts in training about the importance of bearing repetition
without instilling in them passivity or resignation? Radical change in psycho-
analysis is subtle.
One obstacle for the analyst to accepting disappointment in relation to
repetition includes the fear of blaming patients for not doing a good enough
job, which is difficult to reconcile with the virtually axiomatic notion that the
patient is indeed doing the best that he or she can, given his psychological
adaptation.
I have also wondered if there is an important dynamic operating in the his-
tory of technique, a kind of resistance to our experience of the depressive posi-
tion in which we have a somewhat disavowed or even dissociative relationship
to the necessary repetition and thus slowness in psychoanalysis. The patience
setting the background for the analyst’s experience of repetition and resistance
to bearing repetition required in our work and the ongoing limits to our
understanding require that we constantly work toward a paradoxically lofty
and modest analytic ego ideal best described by Samuel Beckett’s (1984) notion
of trying, in an ongoing way, to “fail better.”
I think that more or less as a field we’ve operated with the idea that a good
training analysis should help the analyst to work with a sense of limitation and
incompleteness. However, an additional source of resistance is that, para-
doxically, one important reason for having an analysis as an analyst not only
involves working through conflicts but also the inevitability of not working
through some conflicts. In other words, good analysis allows us to hold unset-
tling narratives related to how life will always be partly out of joint, even for
the most psychologically privileged among us or the best analyzed.
The stability and impenetrability of the mind is so much a part of what we
take for granted as analysts that we may not really allow ourselves to voice too
much about the difficulties and trials related to the repetitive nature of analysis.
Rosenfeld (1987, p189) was quite cogent about the tendency for many analyses
to involve what he referred to as “endless repetition” and that it was important
48 The melancholic errand of psychoanalysis
for patients to experience the analyst’s acceptance that much repetition is

inevitable. The analyst’s acceptance of the patient’s process being repeated in
the form of transference-countertransference experiences in the analysis gives
the patient resolve and augmented capacities to bear the usually unsettling
narrative of his inner life. Schafer (2003) has also written poignantly about the
many sources of resistance that the analyst encounters in being able to bear
repetition.
One source of resistance to bearing repetition may be based on the analyst’s
idealized versions of analysis or grandiose fantasies that analysis should be

easier or more dramatically “successful.” Some analysts identify with patients’
wishes that things could shift more easily. Others may be prone to identifying with
patients’ wishes to externalize responsibility for conflict and suffering. Another
form of resistance to bearing repetition may involve the analyst’s doubts about
his own goodness such as persistent self-criticism (e.g. Schafer, 2003).
There are also experiences of repetition that can actually be very gratifying,
appreciated or libidinized in any number of possible directions in the transfer-
ence and countertransference. Some may be enjoyed while others may interfere
with our capacity to bear repletion and to explore it’s meaning. The effort
expended by both patients and analysts to help patients bear psychic pain is
often as much a source of enormous warmth and comfort as it is uncomfortable
for the patient. One could characterize it as a kind of partnership in bearing the
existential realities of the patient’s repetitive, continuous personhood as well as
the analyst’s personhood with her patient. It is often a place where the patient’s
sense of ironic engagement with their own inner life is on view and it is heart-
ening when we see resignation toward repetition moves toward ironic engage-
ment. For example, a brilliant man who has a deeply atheistic belief system has
realized with increasing play through our work that in my words to him, he is
repetitively and zealously committed to a religious belief that he is destructive
to women and that any woman who knows him more deeply will discover this
(despite women finding him charming and appealing). Consider another patient
and me enjoying a look everyday as she leaves the office that might be trans-
lated as “this is what we do. This is who I am and who you are with me.”
After all, the analytic couple is a kind of couple and part of intimacy involves
two people helping each other to bear the continuing ways that each is stuck as
a person, trying to change and also unable to change. However, it can also
become anxiety-producing as it is lost or as it becomes over-stimulating. We
know how much patients are interested in the vicissitudes of the analyst’s
capacity to absorb the patient’s experience and their attunement to how we feel
about what is repetitive is often a matter of the patient’s concern or even vigi-
lance. Something that hasn’t been emphasized in our literature is how much
repetition itself becomes a safe enough dyadic psychic home base where analysts
receive unconscious “no trespass messages.” No play allowed here.
Cooper (2010a) in an examination of the “grandiosity of self-loathing”
referred to how many times patients’ and analysts’ self-reproach occurs in the
context of unconsciously grandiose expectations. The analyst’s self-recrimina-

tion about the limitations of analytic work sometimes rests on the uncon-
sciously heroic expectations about what can be achieved. Particularly for less
experienced analysts, these heroic or grandiose expectations may have less to do
with characterologic grandiosity than with his or her relatively more earnest
hopes about the impact of analytic work.
Analysts each have conscious and unconscious fantasies about analysis and
how analysis will go or, put another way, therapeutic action. These fantasies
relate to the analyst’s capacity to bear and understand repetition. This fantasy
is operating at times and at times being levied against the patient’s and the
analyst’s actual behavior, performance. Smith (2004) referred to embedded
fantasies of idealized patients that we as analysts carry and that influence our
listening. Cooper (2010b) discussed the ways in which analysts often have con-
sciously and unconsciously held anticipatory fantasies about how sessions will
go as well, which are probably related to both idealized and dreaded fantasies
of the patient and the analysis.
While I view these fantasies as potentially both a hindrance to the progress of
analytic work just as they can also help us to understand built-in negative
countertransference, they involve the analyst’s difficulty in working toward and
within the depressive position. Sometimes these fantasies can be persecutory in
blaming either the patient or analyst for not living up to idealized fantasies
about the patient or the ideals that the analyst holds. It is sobering that these
aren’t only possibilities but occur at different times in many analyses and the
question is to what extent they interfere or how they interfere with the analyst’s
work. These types of fantasies and disappointed expectations include many
other patterns such as idealization or envy of the patient, overriding attraction
and manic flight, and eroticism cloaking aggression. It is sometimes a problem
of analytic hubris or defensively earnest intentions on the part of the analyst to
believe that they will not accompany analytic work.
As an analyst I believe, consciously, that everything that I offer is incomplete.
However, some of our internal representations as competent and our conscious
wishes to feel competent may create blank spaces in bearing disappointment,
incompleteness and particularly repetition. While many analysts such as
Rosenfeld (1987) and Schafer (2003) have emphasized the analyst’s capacity to
bear repetition without blaming oneself as analyst or his patient, this is easier
said than done.
In order to illustrate some of this struggle, I turn to describe a phase of
analytic treatment early in the second year of analysis with Kate—work in
which a great deal of repetition was at play. Kate’s constricted and limited form
of expressiveness felt unusually frustrating and gratifying in certain ways,
operating as a kind of manic defense for us in the face of repetition. Not only
are the analyst’s experiences of disappointment and limitation quite real in
analytic work, but sometimes subtle manic defenses in both patient and analysis
cause us to focus on limitation or even encourage it in ways that unconsciously
titrate engagement and the risks of analyzing new forms of expression of

transference.
Kate’s background featured significant trauma and there are particular kinds
of disappointment that the analyst often has to accept in terms of the limits of
exploration and understanding in relation to trauma. His or her aim is one of
trying to help the patient to best integrate disappointment; but often there are
more sharp limits to working through processes in relation to certain kinds of
trauma (e.g., Green, 2005, 2011). The analyst also needs to distinguish his or
her acceptance of the limits of working through from premature resignation as

analytic work progresses. Perhaps we could think of a kind of good enough
disappointment in all analyses as including the existential realities of limitation
of character of both patient and analyst in the best analyses.
Please keep in mind the following distinction: Our idea of what it is to be a
good analyst is to understand repetitions and to help the patient to relinquish
them. Our feeling of being a good analyst is significantly linked to repeating
with the patient, creating through our unconscious role-responsiveness a kind
of background synchrony or union, regardless of the content of what we are
enacting. By synchrony or union I mean the analyst’s receptivity to the patient,
to her affect, projections, projection identification, fantasies, needs and wishes.
As we try to show our patient how she is repeating, patient and analyst
experience elements of aloneness, an aloneness that results from trying to give
up or modify the pull toward the safety that repetition provides. This safety is
not only internally regulated by an individual but is also dyadically arranged as
places of retreat between patient and analyst.
Kate
Kate, a mid-40s woman, sought analysis because of a continuing tightness in
her stomach and neck, tension that she linked, as did her physician, with psy-
chic rather than physical origins. She has a strong relationship with her hus-
band of 15 years and a quite successful career as a physician. Yet she could not
relax very easily. She enjoyed sex and was able to experience pleasurable
orgasms with her husband; yet during sex, she was sometimes visited by anxiety
and intrusive thoughts and memories of forced sexual activity and intercourse
with her three-year-older brother beginning when she was nine years old and
continuing until she was 11.
Beginning within the first few months of Kate’s analysis and continuing for
years after, she had a habit of joking with self-critical humor about her insen-
sitivity to feelings, how much she consciously avoided feelings, and how this
mode was institutionalized within her family of origin as a family credo of
sorts. She playfully condemned even stepping foot in an analyst’s office. Her
joking with me seemed to involve a most melancholic compromise—one in
which she tried to express feelings but by mocking herself she would control
and obscure affect and be a good child within her family by doing so.
Kate was the youngest of three children and by the time that she reached high
school her other siblings were in college or beyond. Her parents were quite
busy with their careers. Moreover, when they were around, these two highly
successful parents/attorneys were alcoholic and, in her words, in a world of
their own. Her mother issued orders about what was and was not acceptable.
Her father, while on the surface a much warmer and nurturing person, was
kept in tow by her mother.
As Kate began analysis, her jokes often constructed me as a feeling person
who saw things that didn’t occur to her. She was constructed as insensitive and
an “out of it” type of person. In fact, as analysis progressed, she sometimes
referred to me with humor as the girl in our relationship and she as the boy, an
ascription that I tried to explore with her. Kate’s constructions stripped me of
having a penis that made me simultaneously less threatening and scary as a
man, a less likely erotic object, and potentially a maternal object. Before lying
down on the couch each day, Kate’s looks and smiles were both self-deprecat-
ing and inviting. Sometimes I was also characterized as what she referred to as
“a new agey, overly earnest, but lost type girl”—the kind of yoga instructor she
assiduously avoided because of their meaningless language about feelings with
no substance. By contrast, she was a clueless guy, for whom feeling was an
altogether foreign entity.
These were somewhat manic scenarios for her as I was to discover, avoidant
of the loneliness and anxiety that she felt about trying to address her inner life
and trauma. She had been unaccompanied by her parents at the level of any sort
of conversation about feelings during her childhood. At times I wondered with
Kate if her ascriptions to me expressed a set of wishes for a mother who would
have wanted to talk to her. I suggested that, instead, she repeatedly projected
her dreaded fantasies of being soft in her mother’s recriminating view and
located this set of soft feelings in me rather than ask something of me. Kate
responded to these attempts with some parts curiosity and incredulity.
Kate’s mild ridicule, consciously playful in its intent, became highly repetitive
and constricted in terms of her range of associations. Kate seemed to enjoy
herself in these moments and I had a sense of gratification in trying to make
connections between her avoidance of needs and anger and her stomach-
clenching and joking. Sometimes I suggested and she agreed that her incredu-
lousness about feelings also seemed a bit postured almost as a caricature about
being an insensitive “guy.” In many ways I viewed this pattern as a kind of
projective identification process and role responsiveness in which she wished for
me to take a bullet from her mother for being expressive while she enacted the
role of her toughened mother. It occurred to me throughout this repetitive
pattern that Kate might be equipping herself with a penis and disarming me as
having one in the context of her traumatic experiences with her brother. How-
ever, these formulations seemed quite abstract at the time.
In a representative session from this period, Kate began with associations to
a story that she had read about how Target was trying to recover from the
credit card break-in that had occurred in its customer files. The store was
receiving printouts about what sort of marketing methods worked and didn’t to
help customers shift from their mistrust in the store. She said that they were
like emotional reads on the customers’ changing moods and she wanted me to
be able to use a printout method such as this so that she wouldn’t have to know
about her feelings. She associated to a situation with her husband over the
weekend when he was telling her how good she looked and he had become
angry with her because Kate was checked out, barely even showing her husband
that she registered the compliment. She said that she hates it when people
comment on her appearance, whether it is about her body or clothing.
She then referred to a story that I’d heard once before about her 14-year-old
nephew, diagnosed with Aspergers, who on a visit had commented on how nice
her ass looked in her jeans. He had apparently little idea about how inap-
propriate he was being, kind of unassailable given his Aspergers. She and her
husband, both very fond of him, had a conversation with him about how it
wouldn’t be a good idea for him to speak that way with girls whom he might
want to know more or his aunt. He was surprised by this and found it helpful
and thanked them, not exactly understanding what the problem was about.
Kate laughed about her nephew’s surprise and she also commented on the fact
that he was developing a new form of ass berger. I then wondered with her if I
was like her nephew or husband, by violating her rules about what we are able
to voice regarding her affects and her body. I said that perhaps she feels that I
just blurt things out in contrast to the Target read out that she had requested.
She agreed and began elaborating those body parts that were ok for people to
comment on about her—her hair was ok but nothing about her breasts, legs,
face. From the couch I could see her smiling with this activity and she said that
her ear lobes were ok. She then relayed a story of being at the hotel gym during
a conference, and a colleague had commented on how strong her lats were. She
felt that he wasn’t coming on to her but it was just so strange.
As the hour ended, I commented on how her wish was for me to take into
account the approved list but that like her colleague or nephew, I might act as a
rogue agent and make comments about feelings inside her or parts of her that were
off the list. Again, she agreed, and joked as she arose from the couch, “well I feel
that it was productive to get this list out there in more clear fashion for you.”
As I thought about the session I reflected on how many previous occasions
Kate had elaborated elements of wanting to be in exquisite control of how
others saw and responded to her. Yet Kate nearly always had rejected almost
anything I noted related to the expression of wishes for a mother who would
have had a read about what was enough or too much; or the wish for a more
contained brother; or that her caricature of herself as a non-feeling guy reflected
elements of dissociation in relation to her trauma and even identification with
an aggressor.
I began to notice more of my mild frustration with the repetitive mocking
jokes as instructions to stifle each of us and also a diversion from and
repudiation of ways that she was expressing wishes to be seen and to feel safe. I
also began to feel more solitude with Kate and started to take up a subtle var-
iation that I might be the neglected “girl” of her childhood and she was a
slightly softer version of her rather harsh and contemptuous mother.
The repetition of jokes and avoidance of linking between her feeling states
and meaning continued. However, Kate began to speak much more of her
brother’s habit of ejaculating on her stomach and she began to understand more
about why she often placed her hand over her stomach in interactions with
others and while she was lying on the couch. She became more aware of how
much she was constantly adjusting her husband’s placement of his arm around
her waist when they walked as a way to have a final say over where it went.
She hated being surprised by her husband’s or close friends’ physical gestures of
reaching out to touch or hug her, even though she enjoyed the hug and did long
to be more relaxed about touching. I also linked her physical adjustments with
others more and more to a habit of what she did with my interpretations—
always having a small comment, an adjustment as it were, usually a sarcastic
joke or after thought if you will, following whatever I said. We began to see
more explicitly how tightly she had to watch me in our analytic relationship
and how worried she really was with me, a worry that belied her constant
joking.
Over time I became aware of a new countertransference feeling that may
have always been present but seemed to emerge, de novo, a very particular kind
of unbidden and notable self-congratulatory reverie. Despite the fact that my
comments and participation with Kate were quite standard and the repetition
even more apparent and even tedious at times, I had a sense of being a very
good analyst with her; Put simply, the feeling of effectiveness seemed to be
particularly split off from my concerns about ways that her repetitive joking
was quite refractory to my ways of understanding her.
A few times over the years when I’ve made what I think of as particularly
good contact or moved to a deeper way to understand a patient, I have felt a
twinge of envy toward the patient about what the process is providing. I have
no way of knowing whether this is an unusual sensation among analysts. I have
plenty of times when I’m quite relieved that I didn’t have an analyst like me
too. Schafer (2003) is one of the few analysts who has written more explicitly
about these fantasies in the literature though in clinical conferences and super-
vision groups, I have occasionally heard analysts discuss this phenomenon.
These kinds of thoughts and fantasies are diverse in their meaning and con-
text and include our conscious wishes to have been a better patient or to have
worked with a better analyst. It may also involve various forms of regression
on the part of the analyst. I thought about it here as a manifestation of how I
carry both idealized versions as well as unresolved grief about the limitations of
my own analyses as receiver and provider. The best that we can do is to try to
work with these kinds of thoughts and fantasies as they are stimulated in ana-
lytic process. This fantasy, as I tried to work with it in my own mind, seemed
to be partly about the idea of being touched in “just the right way” by an ana-
lyst so as not to incur her reflexive, repetitive, anxiously driven self-mockery.
Perhaps in my own mind this fantasied analyst would be someone who was
careful, not too aggressive and desexualized, which might have been being
enacted through some of Kate’s ascriptions to me. This notion of the “right”
psychic touch—as if there is such a way—seemed to invoke a somewhat
grandiose or heroic fantasy of how to make psychic touch more palatable for
Kate. Yet the more that I thought about this kind of self-congratulory reverie, I
was aware that my interventions were not only quite standard but that I had held
some concerns about the level of Kate’s repetitive joking and my limitations in
being able to help her understand this in her analysis. I began to wonder if this
countertransference feeling might involve an unconsciously manic avoidance of
understanding both the very real and specific ways that Kate was being under-
stood/touched in the analysis and the particular kinds of compromises and
defenses about being touched that had resulted in some elements of restriction
and sense of repetition. In other words, I began to feel that I was struggling to
hold Kate’s best efforts to work in her analysis and to integrate the limits and
disappointment in relationship to our efforts in the analysis. Somehow in my
mind, Kate wasn’t moving quickly enough or I wasn’t helping her to do so.
I had been minimizing, even to some extent, disavowing the fact that my
patient was in a dangerous situation with me as a man, far more dangerous
than I’d realized and that she had realized, even though I was also consciously
aware of how much she might be consciously and unconsciously worried and/or
excited about me from the get go. Intense disavowal on each of our parts was at
play. The envious and self-congratulatory thoughts marked how I had removed
myself from the internal analytic setting of analysis (Parsons, 2007) in which I
would be more firmly situated in understanding Kate’s various transferences related
to me as brother and mother, into being the receiving patient. I had uncon-
sciously minimized that some of Kate’s laughter was flirtatious and aggressive, an
affective sign of being flooded with emotions that she had very little conscious
access to. I say that I had unconsciously minimized her anxiety because I was
conscious of it but my disappointment reflected elements of not appreciating its
power. I was also minimizing that I was inevitably hurting and stimulating her
through my participation. In fact, I believe that it could be argued that I was
necessarily hurting and stimulating her through the process of working with
Kate in analysis.
The repetition and at times stultification that I knew were present in the work
became more illuminated, hardly removed but easier to bear. Interestingly, her
jokes were all about the ways in which I already was being allowed to try to
understand her, to, as it were, psychically touch her. I also took in a bit about how
my envy had unwitting elements of blame toward my patient who in my unconscious
fantasy was working with a better analyst than she even knew or that I was.
My level of pleasure in Kate’s form of play, my frustration with the repeti-
tion, and the envy that I’ve described (with subtle elements of blame toward
Kate) became signals to me—signals that I was holding a fantasy of how ana-
lysis should go, a composite of good feelings and unresolved grief about my
analytic work as analyst and patient that played an important role in working
toward holding experiences of disappointment and repetition as part of our
work together. I became more internally aware of my own kind of subtle
neglect (somewhat reminiscent of Kate’s experience of parental neglect from her
parents) toward Kate and more able to try to understand what was obvious but
unseen—that her repetitive jokes were transformations of overstimulation into
more palatable compromises that both were and were not working well for her.
Perhaps I was greedy to not have to bear the disappointment linked to the
repetitive manifestation of Kate’s characteristic defenses as they appeared in full
force in our work.
When I think of the kind of good enough disappointment that the analyst
works toward accepting about repetition, I’m reminded of Winnicott’s (1945)
statement that “the depressed patient requires of his analyst the understanding
that the analyst’s work is to some extent his effort to cope with his own (the
analyst’s) depression, or shall I say guilt and grief resultant from the destructive
elements of his own (the analyst’s) love.” Most analysts when working well are
continuously accepting repetition and appreciating its importance as a feature
of human functioning and adaptation. Perhaps this is as good a definition as
any of good enough disappointment.
Kate’s characteristic joking didn’t stop, nor some of my mild wishes that she
could modify it. But as analytic work developed she began revealing more
directly her sexual and aggressive fantasies through a series of dreams in which
she was impregnated through IVF. Her associations involved a way in which I
could give her things, sexual things and a baby (a self) but without touching—a
compromise formation in which she could allow me to give to her in generative
and sexual ways without incurring anxiety. These were new ways to try to talk to
me about her sexual and aggressive feelings and wishes along with her char-
acteristic repudiation of desire and longings that were eventually featured in her
continued analytic work. My efforts to bear repetitive, characterologically
driven defensive modes became less fraught and easier to take up with Kate.
Seeking containers for the analyst’s grief and disappointment

While many analysts such as Rosenfeld (1987) and Schafer (2003) have empha-
sized the analyst’s capacity to bear repetition without blaming one’s self as
analyst or his patient, this is easier said than done. Just as patients need a place
to hold and contain their unsettling narrative(s), analysts need a container for
their affects, including grief and disappointment during the analytic process in
order to be as steady an analyst as possible. Analysts also need a container for
the mobilization of their own wishes and hopes for analysis and for their grief.
One of the major challenges in “repetition” in analytic work involves the
necessity to look closely at the ordinary to see something in it that is easily
overlooked. Sometimes repetition is just that while at other times it involves the
analyst’s lack of imagination or empathy to get at what the patient might be
communicating that he wasn’t aware that he was saying. At other times, the
analyst need also raise for himself the possibility that the patient’s repetition
reflects ways in which she wants the analyst to understand commentary on the
analyst’s behavior; or that the patient wishes to punish the analyst for not
offering more help; or that the patient is communicating elements of psychic
drudgery that go on in his mind or went on in his family during development.
One of the major “symptoms” of the analyst’s resistance to working with

repetition and his actual rather than idealized patient is in the analyst’s rejec-
tion of the everyday and ordinary in analytic work, namely repetition. Virginia
Woolf’s (1921) landmark essay “Modern Fiction” gets at the necessity for the
writer to sink into ordinary days and to highlight sometimes hidden moments;
it is often these hidden moments that are of importance that are quite relevant
to analytic work:
Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind

receives a myriad of impressions—trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved
with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower
of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the
life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls differently of old; the moment
of importance came not here but there; so that, if a writer were a free man
and not a slave, if he could write what he chose, not what he must, if he
could base his work upon his own feeling and not upon convention, there
would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in
the accepted style, and perhaps not a single button sewn on as the Bond
Street tailors would have it. Life is not a series of gig-lamps symmetrically
arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding
us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. Is it not the task of the
novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit
(p227)?
Regarding repetition, sometimes we might say that the analyst’s greed for more,
for something “new” is an obstacle to working and occupying the depressive
position in analytic work. I am referring here to the analyst’s wish for more
change from his patient—new insights, changes and shifts along psychic terrain.
I believe that an element of greed for Kate’s improvement may have been
operating in some of my difficulties working with repetition in her analysis. The
analyst’s disappointment in the repetitive elements of the analytic process is
often related to wishes to feel oneself as a usable, serviceable object that is
sometimes in conflict with work to understand the patient’s transference to the
analyst and the unfolding of the patient’s internal objects.
One of the worst elements of greed is its ingratitude and sometimes when we
wish for less repetition or more change from our patient perhaps it is based less
on greed and more on a kind of ingratitude. A related issue is the degree to

which the analyst wishes for coherence about what the patient is communicat-
ing, sometimes leading to premature constructions and interpretations.
Among the analyst’s biggest challenges in understanding the density of repe-
tition is that generally what at first glance seems like repetition is partly a car-
rier for something new. It is very difficult to locate newness in what looks like,
at a surface level, repetition. Cooper and Levit (1998) provided numerous
examples of embedded newness in what looked like old object experience.
Sometimes there are unappreciated elements of newness in the patient’s greater

ability to face certain kinds of disappointment and sadness without as much
protest, resignation or blame. Simple sadness replaces defensively driven
attempts at action. It is easy in the daily experience of analytic work for both
patient and analyst to observe this in its initial manifestations and also to
overlook these manifestations.
It is also especially difficult for less experienced analysts to accept the subtlety
and limited nature of change in analytic work. I wonder if as a field we don’t
do enough to prepare less experienced analysts in this regard. There are many
reasons why this might occur. Good enough disillusionment is generally a dif-
ficult matter to teach because it runs the risk of teaching premature, defensively
lowered expectations or disillusionment. Put a different way, it probably goes
better if we allow our student analysts to come to their own experiences of
appreciation for progress and disappointment with limitation through their
work with patients and, of course, in their own work as patients. It is easy and
understandable for each of us to be greedy for more benefit from this work. It is
also a failure on our part to not help each other as a profession to better inte-
grate as realistically as possible what we are able to provide for our patients.
Sometimes analysts’ more negative feelings about repetition are also masked
by collusive arrangements between the patient and analyst in which the analyst
finds the patient’s associations particularly congruent with his own (e.g.,
Greenberg, 1995; Feldman, 1997; Cooper, 2010b). These experiences of con-
gruence make it particularly difficult to note expressions of unconscious phe-
nomena or enacted elements of the transference. For example, the analyst’s
conscious experience of a patient who is highly likeable or agreeable, “easy” to
understand or empathize with, may pose difficulties in terms of the analyst’s
ability to think about the patient’s internal objects as illustrated in my work
with Kate. The analyst’s ability to think about what is being repeated or
recruited and why this is so is sometimes compromised in these contexts.
Our internal representations of ourselves as competent and our conscious
wishes to feel competent may create blank spaces in our thinking about trans-
ference and our participation, particularly during periods of repetition or stul-
tification in the analytic process.
Probably the most frequent and essential place for the analyst’s struggles
with repetition lay in his relationship to the patient’s attachment to internalized
objects. Some of the most destructive analyses reflect analysts who are unable to
work with patients’ internalized object relations and instead try to change them
through new experience or rivalry toward the internal object.
The analyst’s tendency to become deadened to the ruin or the patient’s original
“catastrophe” (Bion, 1959) that is being expressed is a hazard of analytic work
particularly since analysis hinges on frequent meetings and inevitable repetition
(Rosenfeld, 1987). As Beckett (1954, Act II, p37) put it, “habit is the great dead-
ener.” We are vulnerable to becoming deadened to the patient’s unconscious
communications since analysis always involves the danger that the analyst’s
thinking will become constricted and incorporated in relationship to the lim-

itations of the patient’s mind. This means, in another language, that defense
become operative in the minds of the patient and analyst.
Another way to put this is that we can become deadened to the patient’s
creations and story of ruin. It is sometimes quite easy to lose a hold on the
patient’s moment that Rilke (1922) describes as the barely containable moment
of “the beginning of terror.” I underscore Rilke’s use of the word beginning
here: Analysis involves meeting the patient in this beginning of terror, but it
also involves the day-in and day-out experience of the beginning becoming
incorporated into the routine, or at least the illusory routine.
Even projective identification patterns may become repetitive, normative. I
have found, for example, that in the context of relentless negative transference
and projective identifications in which I hold the worst experiences of a
patient’s degraded self-representations, I have sometimes become deadened to
the meaning of these ascriptions. Sometimes it is a defensive reaction to a very
negative transference and a feeling that no matter what the analyst says or
provides is empty and without meaning for the patient. The analyst may engage
in a kind of unconscious form of retaliation against the patient’s projections of
devalued parts of self through a deadened reaction to this negativity. Con-
tinually feeling that one is a bad object, a devalued and insignificant object, the
analyst may sometimes express hostility through a kind of indifference to these
ascriptions. It is as if the analyst fights back by saying, in effect, your words do
not hurt or even influence me. In these instances, what may have the trappings
of forbearance belie a quiet form of revenge.
These enactments in relation to repetitive forms of projective identification
are quite different from the analyst’s capacity to bear the patient’s rage.
When we are bearing this rage, the analyst hasn’t moved into indifference. He
is feeling the impact of the terrible feelings that the patient experiences as
projected experiences about the analyst. When the analyst is working with
these projected elements of hostility, often the patient is able to feel the
analyst’s struggle to hold his esteem intact. This struggle may very well involve
elements of the analyst’s capacity to bear disappointment. In contrast, indiffer-
ence by the analyst is a defensively held sense of insularity that frightens
the patient because she cannot feel the analyst in a relationship with her, no
matter how fraught that relationship may be in the context of projective
identification.
In less dramatic contexts, however, I believe that each analytic dyad begins to
develop normative patterns of enactment involving the affective limits of what
the analyst or patient are able to contain. Even patterns of projective identifi-
cation sometimes become institutionalized as part of how the couple begins to
work together.
I recall a patient, Marcus who could not allow anything good to occur
between us. Even my greeting of hello each day in the office waiting room was a
source of suspicion, anxiety and contempt. Marcus thought that I revealed
myself as a “surface dweller” because I greeted him. At the time, it would occur
to me that saying hello to Marcus in the face of his contempt was in part a
masochistic submission to his angry greeting. I worked hard to think about why
Marcus needed to greet me each day in this way. I concluded that my greeting
was, in addition to a modicum of courtesy that I extend to all of my patients,
part of a stubborn refusal on my part to accede to his wishes to give up and let
him ruin our analytic work together. Eventually, Marcus was able to greet me
and to even meet up with elements of “goodness” in our work together.
Perhaps it could be said that for such patients the destructiveness of patterns
of defense and especially some forms of projective identification the closest thing
to art that the patient associates with his artistic expressiveness, indeed his self-
hood. These patients are so beset with shame about their own needs that being
consciously prideful of their defensive arrangements is one of the only safe ways
to be seen by the analyst (Fairbairn, 1952; Steiner, 1993, 2011). Kate was con-
sciously and unconsciously prideful of her both her characterologic defenses and
even her shame about this adaptation.
The analyst’s sense of disappointment and limitation often reflect realistic
assessments of dyadic and existential limitation for integration at any juncture
of analytic work. Psychoanalysis is intrinsically incomplete. An important
function of psychoanalysis relates to how it provides for the patient a play-
ground for the transformation of desire, anxiety, sadness and anger into a kind
of good enough disappointment and incompleteness. Sometimes the analyst’s
experiences of disappointment relate to his accurate read on these existential
limitations. Sometimes his or her difficulty bearing disappointment about repetition
relates to unconsciously grandiose or inhibited expectations. Both unconsciously
grandiose and inhibited expectations may serve to titrate his or her anxiety
about both incompleteness and the risks of knowing about and analyzing
transference. At still other times his capacity to bear disappointment relates to a
repository of regret or sadness about either his own limitations as an analyst in
his own analysis or as an analyst in his work with patients.
References
Beckett, S. (1954). Waiting for Godot. New York: Grove Press.
Beckett, S. (1984). Worstward Ho. New York: Grove Press/Atlantic.
Bion, W. R. (1959). Attacks on linking. In Second Thoughts. London: Karnac, 1984, pp93–109.
Bion, W. W. R. (1970). Attention and Interpretation. London: Tavistock.

Cooper, S. H. (2010a). Self-criticism and unconscious grandiosity: Transference-coun-
tertransference dimension. International Journal of Psychoanalysis. 91: 1115–1136
Cooper, S. S. H. (2010b). A Disturbance in the Field: Essays in Transference-Counter-
transference. London: Routledge.
Cooper, S. H. (2015). Reflections on the Analyst’s “Good Enough” Capacity to Bear
Disappointment, with Special Attention to Repetition. Journal American Psychoanalytic
Association, December 2015 63: 1193–1213.
Cooper, S. S. H. and Levit, D. (1998). Old and new objects in Fairbairnian and American
relational theory. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 8: 603–624.

Fairbairn, R. (1952). Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality. London: Routledge.
Fairbairn, R. M. (1997). Projective identification: The analyst’s involvement. International
Journal of Psychoanalysis 78: 227–241.
Freud, S. (1920). Beyond the Pleasure Principle. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psy-
chological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XVIII (1920–1922). London: Hogarth Press.
Green, A. (2005). Key Ideas for Contemporary Psychoanalysis: Misrecognition and
Recognition of the Unconscious. Hove & New York: Brunner-Routledge.
Green, A. (2011). Illusions and Disillusions of Psychoanalytic Work. London: Karnac.
Greenberg, J. (1995) Psychoanalytic technique and the interactive matrix. Psychoanalytic
Quarterly, 64: 1–22.
LaFarge, L. (2014). How and why unconscious phantasy and transference are the
defining features of psychoanalytic practice. International Journal of Psychoanalysis,
95: 1265–1278.
Ogden, T. (1989). The Primitive Edge of Experience. Northvale, NJ: Aronson.
Ogden, T. (2012). Creative Readings: Essays on Seminal Analytic Works. London and
New York: Routledge.
Rosenfeld, H. (1987). Impasse and Interpretation: Therapeutic and Anti-therapeutic
Patients. New Library of Psychoanalysis. London: Routledge.
Schafer, R. (2003). Bad Feelings. New York: Other Press.
627–658.
Spezzano, C. (2007). A home for the mind. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 76S: 1563–1583.
Steiner, J. (1993). Psychic Retreats: Pathological Organisations of the Personality in
Routledge.
Winnicott, D. (1958). The capacity to be alone. International Journal of Psychoanalysis,
39: 416–420.
Wolff, V. (1921). The Broadview Anthology of British Literature: The Twentieth Century
and Beyond. Ed. J. Black. 2006. 227. Print.
Chapter 4
Exploring a patient’s shift from

relative silence to verbal
expressiveness: Observations on
an element of the analyst’s
participation
In this chapter, I trace a portion of close process of a patient’s shifts from a

relatively silent and inhibited stance to one in which he is beginning to verbalize
more about his experience and fantasy. I will try to illustrate some tensions
between the analyst’s role as facilitating expressiveness and as occupying a
place in the patient’s internalized world. Since the analyst’s functions as facil-
itator and as internal object (often an obstacle to the patient’s expressiveness)
are sometimes (actually, quite often) in conflict with one another, it is impor-
tant for the analyst to be able to work internally with this conflict as he works
with his patient. Splitting processes between these two functions may provide
the analyst with cues related to the patient’s and the analyst’s resistance to
understanding the patient’s communication of unconscious conflict and the
patient’s recruitment of the analyst into the patient’s internalized world.
In some ways, I want to capture something of a quality for the analyst of a
good enough “can’t win” in terms of the difficulties of both roles as facilitator
of expressiveness and leaving room for the patient to feel us as an internal
object. As analysts, we are held in the melancholic awareness that we are
always moving in and out of our capacities to understand patient’s commu-
nications about transference. The acceptance of this “can’t win” quality is
another element of good enough disappointment during the analytic process. I
mean to say by this that the notions of incompleteness and failure are built into
the analytic stance, in that we are often occupying room in the patient’s mind in
one place or other while not occupying other areas. This is by no means
necessarily problematic, but it is always worth thinking about whether we are
engaging in splitting regarding these two dimensions of analytic work.
It is worth pointing out how both Kleinian and American Relational theory
have influenced my thinking in what follows. I have found the contributions of
many contemporary Kleinians indispensable to understanding the patient’s
internalized object representational world and unconscious fantasy. I try to
understand how the patient is not only projecting particular kinds of uncon-
scious internalized object relationships on to the analytic situation, but also
trying to reduce the differences between the experiences of the analyst and the
patient’s internalized fantasies (e.g., Feldman, 1997; O’Shaughnessy, 1992). I
62 Exploring a patient’s shift from silence to expressiveness
have also been influenced by contemporary American analysts, chiefly Stephen

Mitchell (e.g., Mitchell, 1991) and Philip Bromberg (1995), who have explored
the importance of examining the analyst’s self-reflective participation in under-
standing both the patient’s internalized representational world and the analyst’s
potential impact on the patient’s associations and progress.
These traditions don’t make for an easy melding. In my own thinking, how-
ever, they each illuminate the importance of internalized representations and
interaction as avenues for elaborating both the patient’s internal object world
and the patient’s and analyst’s resistance to understanding unconscious conflict.

In the work of Rosenfeld (1987) and especially in Michael Feldman’s work (e.g.,
Feldman, 1994, 1997, 1999), I have found a bridge between the worthwhile
emphasis on understanding the patient’s projections of an internalized object
relationship and propensities toward action that occur in enactments between
patient and analyst. In this chapter, I try to further understand the patient’s
predilection to unconsciously reduce the discrepancy between the phantasy of
an archaic object relationship and the analyst’s propensities toward action
(resistance) in the context of a patient’s transition from less verbalized states to
more verbal expressiveness.
Clinical description of the first eight months of work

I will present a summary of eight months of considerable silence from work
with a patient in four times weekly analysis, followed by two detailed sessions
in which the patient begins to speak more actively.
Mr. M was 21 years old when he began to see me. Quiet, almost mute and
appearing as though he might be involved in an internal conversation with the
ideas in his head more than in interpersonal engagement, when I first met Mr.
M, I wasn’t sure about whether he was psychotic. After a few meetings with
Mr. M, I felt a strong sense of affection and curiosity about him as well as
clarity that he was not psychotic.
Despite his quietness, Mr. M was eager to talk to me. He began sitting across
from me, and after several months, he began using the couch. I had suggested to
Mr. M after the first month to use the couch, and after the first few months
passed and he experienced considerable difficulty speaking, he had thought that
it might be easier for him to speak if he tried using the couch. As will become
clear in learning about Mr. M’s history, he had experienced many conflicts with
his parents about rules and religion in his family. When he did start using the
couch, I tried to listen to see if he had done so due to a subtle form of following
my rules that might draw us into a compliant enactment (e.g., Feldman, 1999),
but it was not apparent in his associations. However, it did not immediately in
any way facilitate his ability to speak.
Mr. M had grown up in an orthodox Jewish family, but by the age of 13 had
realized that he thought of his parents’ religious life as meaningless and bizarre
to him. He couldn’t reconcile his sense of his parents’ high-level intellects and
Exploring a patient’s shift from silence to expressiveness 63
achievement with their religious practice. He said that by the age of 11 he

questioned and no longer believed in the concept of God, but it made him
anxious to really consider the implications of his thinking. He felt cut off from
his parents and his religious and social community. By age 13, he was convinced
and told his parents that he wanted to attend public school rather than the
parochial school he had previously attended. They refused, but ongoing, inter-
mittent conflagrations of this conflict led them to relent when Mr. M was a
junior in high school.
As high school continued, Mr. M withdrew and sought even more isolation
from his parents. Mr. M was first in his class but had felt scolded for his study
practices (school was quite easy for him, and he excelled but with little work),
religious beliefs and his friendships with less religious boys. He felt that his
mother fretted about “what kind of boy he was becoming” when he spoke of
his political and religious beliefs, and her worry could turn into anxiety and
hostility. He had felt simultaneously guilt-ridden and enraged at both his par-
ents throughout high school, particularly after his sophomore year when he
refused to follow their religious practices. He became increasingly close to his
maternal uncle’s family that he described as a more “flexible, less worried
atmosphere,” and it was a comparatively less religious family. Mr. M’s mother
was both distressed by his relationship with her brother but also relieved that
he remained linked and connected to his extended family. His parents were
trying to tolerate and bear their profound sense of concern and disappointment.
They were still puzzled by Mr. M’s behavior three years after he’d left home for
college, though in Mr. M’s view, they were less conspicuously angry about it
over time.
Mr. M had been close to and idealized his father up until he was ten years
old. In some sense, he realized as a young adult that his more tender memories
were related to his experiences with his father. He experienced his mother as
highly invested in his academic performance and that she was most praising
when he fulfilled duties at home and at school. He thought of his parents as
effective managers and mutually admiring of their roles as parents, but he was
uncertain about whether there was a passionate connection between them.
Mr. M felt that his father began getting quite angry at him at the point that
Mr. M started to very aggressively question him about God and his religious
practices. His father would explode when Mr. M, entering adolescence, was
sarcastic about their faith, particularly when he was sarcastic with his mother.
Mr. M felt that his parents were ashamed of him within their small religious
community, particularly when he began defying their rules.
Mr. M’s parents had refused to pay for psychotherapy when Mr. M asked his
school counselor in high school about talking to someone in private practice
psychotherapy. The counselor had pleaded with Mr. M’s parents to no avail.
When Mr. M came to college in Boston, Mr. M’s uncle suggested analysis for
Mr. M when Mr. M was feeling depressed and provided financial support for
the analysis. This gave the analysis a potentially conspiratorial cast as lying
outside the parents’ wishes and blessing—a part of Mr. M’s radical move away
from his parents, a move that would have been occurring in the context of
young adult separation-individuation but that took on a more violent and
deracinating tone given the intense conflict during high school.
I was also aware of the potentially conspiratorial structure of the analysis in
my own countertransference reactions. I was aware that I could easily be seen
as more like his uncle, facilitating his analysis and separation from his parents
(which had realistic elements), and I didn’t want to encourage a splitting pro-
cess in which he would vilify his parents without working through his complex
loving and hostile feelings toward them (Steiner, 2006a).
At a more personal level, I was aware that another part of what seemed like
this conspiratorial element related to my own upbringing of strong atheism.
Within my own family, there had been generational drift from devout Judaism
to atheism, and my father had radically rejected religion within his own family.
When Mr. M began seeing me, he was in his third year of college and already
being recruited for graduate school in his area of focus. Mr. M had a great deal
of difficulty speaking with me, and as he began, he could speak only about his
science studies and some of his competitive feelings with classmates. Mr. M
said that when he was with me he didn’t have words, and while a quiet person,
this was a very unusual experience for him. He was tormented and ashamed by
his inability to have words. He said that he’d never felt this way before, even
though he’d often been shy and careful with his two friends at school. He was
able to speak to his parents during this time as well, though their talking was
limited by the fact that neither he nor his parents were able to talk about reli-
gion or what happened as he was finishing high school. He likened conversing
with them as “walking through a field of land mines.”
Over these months, Mr. M found his lack of words and thoughts when he
was with me to be surprising, troubling and difficult to integrate with his con-
scious experience of trusting me and wanting to speak to me. He said that he
thought that he liked me and trusted me, so he couldn’t understand his reluc-
tance. He said that he felt as though he didn’t have his mind. I suggested that he
might be afraid that I would want him to learn my language or ask him to
sacrifice his language for mine. I told him that this form of silence might con-
stitute his best protection from being co-opted into submission or from
expressing hostile feelings that made him uncomfortable. I had always con-
sidered that his relative silence reflected his unconscious anger toward me as a
parent and that his silence served as a compromise in which he withheld his
hostility (his words) while expressing it (through not verbally communicating
with me). Yet Mr. M denied feelings of hostility toward me and instead con-
tinued to berate himself for his silence and said that he felt ashamed.
Many of Mr. M’s comments when he began treatment were limited to harsh
assessments of himself, such as: “I am pathetic, an asshole because I can’t talk. I
want to talk but I don’t have any words. I don’t know what to say even though
I want to say things. I literally don’t understand what’s going on. I feel like I
don’t have a mind with you.” He might also ask something like: “Do I make
you feel like a failure?” or “Am I the worst patient you’ve ever had?” or “Am
the most boring person you’ve ever worked with?” or “Do you regret taking me
on?” I told him that he might be thinking that, like with his parents, there was
a bad fit. He would agree, but there was little conviction in his voice, and he
would quickly return to his shame that he couldn’t say more to me.
Mr. M’s developing capacity to speak was a gradual process. As he began to
verbalize more about his political attitudes and those of others he respected and
disrespected, he seemed to become more emotionally expressive. In a repre-

sentative session from the end of this phase of sustained silences, Mr. M began
speaking of two commentators who were probably young men about ten years
older than he. He described them repeatedly as witty and quite contemptuous
of their political opponents. He began summarizing their mocking rants about
conservative politicians, and he seemed to be enjoying himself in relating these
views. He used the terms “stupid” and “tools” in referring to the politicians
being criticized, and his tone became more aggressive as well.
Then, in characteristic fashion, Mr. M became silent for what seemed like a
long period of time, likely ten minutes or so. I began to ask him what he was
thinking, and he said that he didn’t understand what was happening to him.
His mind was blank. I wondered if he had grown silent because he was
expressing something about his own anger through the works of these two
commentators and that he became anxious about these hostile feelings. I sug-
gested that what he seemed most intrigued by was not only the commentator’s
positions, but also their freedom to speak their minds. He said immediately,
nearly interrupting me, “with impunity.”
He then agreed and said that he felt pleasure in “hating on” these con-
servative thinkers. He again grew silent and then began apologizing for his
silence. I suggested that through apology to me, he might be trying to make
reparation with his parents and me—that perhaps he felt guilty about having
his thoughts and feelings even though he also felt so strongly about the legiti-
macy of his feelings in relation to his parents. He did and didn’t want to hurt
either his parents or me. I told him that perhaps he was also quiet with me in
order to ensure that he had his mind and that it would not be questioned. He
spoke again about his guilt about the kind of son he was to his parents, in some
ways ill-matched to them. He then said that he did feel contempt toward them
and didn’t know how to hold these feelings. I said to him that he didn’t know
how to hold these feelings without hating himself or withdrawing from his
thoughts and feelings (his mind) like he did so often with me. I pointed to how
he seemed to feel either totally justified to be angry at one moment or, at
another, to not have any right to any of these angry feelings. There was no way
to hold that he felt both angry and guilty about being angry.
My sense is that in the period leading up to the following two sessions,
which mark the early phase of Mr. M’s transition to being more verbally
expressive, he began sensing that he was identified with and envious of those
who felt free to speak and particularly free to express aggressive feelings. As
much as he consciously knew that he was angry with his parents and feared
being hurt by them, he had enacted various forms of withdrawal from aware-
ness of his own angry feelings and his awareness of theirs toward him through
his silence. These “commentators” became a metaphor within the analysis
about his own wish to speak and give commentary about his inner life, “with
impunity.”
Over time, Mr. M seemed to feel increasingly resonant with my interpreta-
tions about feeling guilt about being a bad patient and a bad son and his fears
of hurting through his hostility and being hurt. Mr. M began to gradually speak
a bit more freely and to associate. I was relieved in some way myself to have
fewer lengthy periods of silence.
Discussion of clinical material during the first eight months of

analysis
As these months went by, I began to notice a few forms of splitting in my for-
mulations, thoughts and feelings about Mr. M. One set of impressions involved
my awareness of Mr. M’s fear of his own sense of hostility toward both his
parents and me that interfered with his speaking. The other side of this split
more prominently featured Mr. M’s fear that I, like his parents, would coerce
and indoctrinate him into my world of communication and language. I was
quite aware that his silence might represent both his fear of hurting and being
hurt and that like any defense, it might function simultaneously as an expres-
sion of hostility as well as a form of protecting himself and me from a greater
awareness of his hostility. Yet within this kind of split, I noticed more fluctua-
tion between these two poles than was usual for me. I also noticed that I tended
to be more aware of his fear of being hurt by his parents than I was of his
concern about expressing hostile feelings toward his parents.
I noticed another related split between myself as an internal object prohibit-
ing expressiveness and as an analyst who wished him to be able to express
himself. While it was easy for me to imagine his allergy to indoctrination
through analysis, I think that I experienced in the countertransference more a
sense of welcoming his thoughts and less a sense of being an internalized object
prohibiting and inhibiting him from feeling and thinking. In this mode, I was
more aware of myself as an external object to his internalized objects, wel-
coming his thoughts, feelings and words—a kind of focus on the “unobjec-
tionable transference” (Freud, 1912; Stein, 1981) in contrast to the internal
object whom he feared hurting or from whom he feared being hurt.
My countertransference reactions made sense to me in terms of wanting a
young man who is largely silent in his analysis to be able to speak and to dis-
cover more about his inner life. Yet I couldn’t help but think that this easy
congruence with what I wished for and the aims of analysis was suspicious and
likely a form of countertransference resistance (e.g., Feldman, 1997). My wishes
for Mr. M to feel freer to verbally express himself obscured and elided ways
that I had become an internal object he would either hurt or by whom he
would be hurt.
Thus, I had wondered during these months whether I resisted being experi-
enced by Mr. M as an internalized object. More specifically, I had in mind his
feeling that his parents and, in particular, his father had tried to control his
thoughts, especially about his religious orientation. I was aware that in the
transference he might feel controlled by me as he’d felt with his parents, and at
times I offered these interpretations as part of why he might be silent. Yet it

seemed important that I found myself either thinking that he would feel that I
was being too directive and controlling by interpreting inaccessible elements of
his unconscious life or colluding in some sense by unwittingly trying to avoid
being experienced as one of his parents.
I came to believe that Mr. M was expressing and communicating the trans-
ference partially through his fear of speaking and being co-opted into my ways
of being and thinking—my psychoanalytic religion, as it were. I did not know
yet what kind of symbolization he had available to him, what capacities to
access his thoughts and feelings and to communicate them to me. For Mr. M,
the act of reflection and experience with me was perhaps an experience of
fearing theft and robbery—that someone will steal and control what he has,
who he is. Mr. M was trying to be in the presence of another, me, without
feeling that he would be obliterated.
During Mr. M’s sustained periods of silence, I imagined that there were ways
in which he regarded or experienced me in a safer and possibly more loving
position than what was suggested through his enacted, fearful protective
silence. Within this fantasy, I felt internally loved by Mr. M, though this nar-
rative existed in my fantasy of Mr. M’s internalized object world. While in one
sense this is a fantasy of Mr. M’s improvement (Cooper, 2010a, 2010b; Ornstein,
1995), it is also a fantasy that circumvents his internalized world of prohibitive
and punishing objects. It also turns a blind eye to the very silence that he has
enacted with me. Mr. M was developing trust in me, but at the same time, my
experience (fantasy) of him trusting was quite homogenous and lacking in tex-
ture. In retrospect, I think that these fantasies of Mr. M suggested not only his
protean or developing trust (e.g., Steiner, 1993, 2011), but also a split between a
facilitating object and his experience of me as an internalized dangerous object.
Mr. M’s internalized world was something that I can imagine during this silence,
but the images are exceedingly vague and abstract—they lacked “figurability”
(Botella & Botella, 2005; Civitarese, in press), and this is hardly surprising given
the silence and retreat that had pervaded his analysis so far.
While I cannot prove it, I believe that my continuing internal work at
understanding the splitting of feelings and fantasies about Mr. M being angry
versus his fears of being hurt, as well as the splits between my being the
indoctrinator versus the analyst who welcomed his associations, were a part of
Mr. M’s emergence from his silence. Director (2009) has suggested that the
analyst may often be in the unwitting role of obstructing the patient’s freedom
to feel enlivened and to have words and that noticing these forms of resistance
may contribute to the analyst’s capacity to become an “enlivening” object
(p121). In some of my thinking about splitting processes between internal object
and facilitator, I think it is possible that there were elements of my eagerness
for Mr. M to speak that he may have been responding to. I don’t say this so
much about what I observed in his reactions to me during this period; instead,
as he did become more verbal, I noted at times that he felt sarcastic and con-
temptuous (e.g., Riesenberg-Malcolm, 1999; Steiner, 2011) toward me about

pleasure that he thought I experienced with his speaking more. He seemed to
feel embarrassed and feared humiliation as he began speaking more, and I rea-
lize now that he was hyper-vigilant to any signs of my wanting him or needing
him to speak for reasons of my own. Later in the analysis, including some ses-
sions that I will present in detail, Mr. M. felt humiliated with expressions of
need and tenderness, and often he sought to reverse the situation by construct-
ing me as the object of humiliation and he as the derider.
The splitting within the countertransference that I describe here persisted as
he became more verbal in ways that I continue to explore in the following two
detailed sessions. The following sessions occur as Mr. M is beginning to associate
more actively. While there are still long periods of silence, there is a strikingly
more open and revealing tone than during our first eight months of work.
Session one
Mr. M began this session in silence for a few moments. He became critical of
himself about not having something immediate to say. I wondered silently if
this meant that he had nothing presentable to say. He said that he’d been seeing
his friends Anthony and Jon more in the evenings after studying and that he
wasn’t sure but that maybe he was feeling close to them. He said, “I don’t
really know about the friend thing. I don’t know how to do it. I never know
whether when we have a good time if they want to do this again and whether I
should ask. Sometimes I don’t want to even try to get together because then I
won’t know what to do about getting together again.”
I told him that wanting something and enjoying something with his friends
might bring up a feeling that it could end or be ambiguous about whether they
wanted more as he might. He wished that he wouldn’t have to feel vulnerable
and that at times he’d rather not engage in order to avoid being hurt. I won-
dered if he might feel that way with me as well—that to say more might mean
more risk, exposure and uncertainty about how I’ll respond. He agreed and said
that, even so, it was far easier with these guys and with me than with women.
(Here, I feel I am being recruited as an older man who might give him guidance
about women.)
He then spoke of never knowing how to approach girls. He told me about a
date in which he’d asked out a woman whom he’d known from class. This was
the first time that he’d talked of a date, though he had told me about a girl
whom he used to see occasionally during high school. He spoke of how he’d
been “stupid” about this recent date. He took her to a kind of formal restaurant
but regretted doing so because it made it seem like it was a more forward,
presumptuous kind of beginning. He said that it made him seem uncool, too
eager and too goofy. Taking her to coffee would have been a better choice, less
conspicuous. My mind associated to the actor Rick Moranis, who played a sort
of socially inept character in an old American comedy, the film Ghostbusters.
He is kind of a nerdy guy who is trying to be grown up in order to impress a

sophisticated woman played by Sigourney Weaver. He lets her know that when
he serves Brie at his parties, he leaves it out for 20 minutes to reach room
temperature. I am thinking of the character as having very little information
about being an adult, and he is trying to impress her but she sees through it. As
viewers, we are invited to think of him as silly and foolish. I associate to a level
of pseudo-precocity that he had when he both knew that he found his parents’
beliefs to be at odds with his own and yet needed them to be his parents, to
love, accept and take care of him in ways that he didn’t yet know how. I said to
Mr. M: “Once again, you are afraid that you are showing someone too much
about what you want. You want to reach out without appearing weak and
vulnerable and perhaps you even think that if only you could, there would be a
way to avoid being vulnerable to rejection or disappointment.”
During the ensuing silence, I begin to wonder whether Mr. M is anxious about
what he is showing me and covers it with a pseudo-maturity. He is speaking
more freely, and I am very pleased, relieved, and somewhat excited that he is
doing so.
Mr. M was silent for a long time, maybe five minutes or so, and said, “Yeah,
that’s pretty schwang wang wang” referring, I think, to his states of vulner-
ability with his friends and this particular young woman. I asked him what the
phrase meant, and he told me that this meant that “it was kind of sketchy, not
going well. Like if you tell a bad joke and it’s awkward with the other person,
it’s schwang wang wang. Sometimes when I say this in analysis, it feels pretty
schwang wang wang, awkward.”
Silently, my associations from schwang wang wang went to how he was
allowing himself to tell me that he feels vulnerable, awkward, not exactly
knowing how to be a friend, a boyfriend or a patient. Then I thought that
Mr. M was saying that maybe things weren’t quite kosher and that he thought
he shouldn’t have his analysis. Related to this sense was the notion that his
alliance with his uncle and with me were other things that he shouldn’t have.
Perhaps he was saying that each of these relationships involved an unholy alli-
ance, even though he’d created the circumstances for these things to happen. He
shouldn’t want too much with his friends or a girl because he could be hurt. My
thoughts also linked schwang wang wang to its association with penis slang—
“schlong” and “wong”—and I realized that Mr. M might be telling me about
schwang wang wang as a way to speak about his penis and his vulnerability.
I told Mr. M that I thought what was schwang wang wang and awkward
was wanting things from his friends and a woman or from me in the analysis
and that he thought it was pretty sketchy, maybe not even kosher to want these
things in a more open-ended way, not prescribed and defined, even though he
did want these things. Maybe he could be disappointed or, maybe even worse,
hurt. I suggested that he might especially experience this vulnerability in the
context of speaking more freely with me as he was now doing.
Subsequent to this session, each of us would bring up the term when he was
struggling. I would sometimes say, “this is schwang wang wang,” and he would
nod his head in agreement. The term schwang wang wang was in my view our
primary point of linguistic communication for the first year of analytic work,
even more so than when I would make interpretations with which he agreed. I
believed that it gets at his sense of how difficult the analytic process is; it is also
a childlike communication, an acknowledgment of something inside Mr. M,
some of it unconscious, that was unformulated and in some ways inchoate
about his sense of vulnerability.
Then he told me that he thought “human beings pretty much sucked.” He felt
that they were mostly not that smart and behaved in cruel ways. He said that
he mostly wished that he would be alive when the “awesome robot stage of
earth development” occurred. He elaborated something that he’d told me
before, which is that he thinks that robots will take over most of human affairs
at some point, hopefully when he is still alive. He continued, saying that it will
be a time when there will be tremendous growth in intellectual development
and possibly less killing among humans as they are dominated by awesome
robots. Then he said, with a degree of humor and smiling, “it will be awesome
when the awesome robot reign begins.”
I was aware of Mr. M’s rage toward the humans who had hurt him, but I
was quite aware of a devastating sense of pain in Mr. M that was difficult for
him to bear. Did he feel that his parents were robots of a sort or wanted him to
be a robot? I imagined sadness that lay immediately beneath his rage more than
I felt it from him. After a very long period of silence, I said, “You welcome the
awesome robot stage when you won’t have to try to talk to me and want
things; or take a girl to dinner and feel that you’ve exposed yourself as wanting
more than she might want; or having friends who you enjoyed being with and
then not know whether they want to see you again tomorrow. It’s not very
awesome.” A few minutes of silence went by, and as the hour ended, he said,
“Yeah, it’s pretty schwang wang wang.”
Mr. M’s anger and disappointment in humans stirred in me a sense that
perhaps his analysis was becoming a safe place to hate. I was struck by his
hostility as consistent with an attack on the part of himself that had expressed
longings (e.g., Fairbairn, 1952; Kris, 1990) and that his mention of robots was
an expression of hostility and defense against the vulnerability he’d discussed in
the hour; I was also aware that this is one of the first instances of Mr. M
expressing hope of any kind, however perverse in his rejection of humankind. I
associated to thoughts about how the awesome robot stage was his own
attempt to keep alive a hoped for object, to idealize humanity (of course while
devaluing it), in order to find people (people of sorts) toward whom he could
have hope and expectation. In this latter formulation, I was also aware that I
had transformed his attacking and hateful feelings into an expression of the
opposite that I explore here.
Discussion of session one

During the end of the hour and after the session, I was aware again of a pecu-
liar sense that it was so easy, perhaps too easy, to welcome Mr. M’s hostility
and eagerness for robots and that I never seemed to directly feel the target of
the negative transference, someone who as a human and his analyst was dis-
appointing to him. I could easily think about these allusions to the negative
transference, but I didn’t really feel it as the leading edge of his communication.
Why was my experience so lacking in nuance in its welcoming of his emergence
from a retreat? Of course, I considered whether Mr. M’s use of isolation of
affect in his robot imagery was a way to not feel his longings and hostility that
he had expressed earlier in the hour and sought to defend himself against
toward the end of the hour. Nevertheless, the questions persisted: why was my
experience so lacking in nuance in welcoming his increased capacity to speak,
and why did I feel at such remove from negative transference?
This session, including discussion of his date, schwang wang wang, and
awesome robots, was the most animated I’d ever seen Mr. M. From one point
of view, there is an oscillation between Mr. M’s expression of desire and vul-
nerability, on the one hand, and ways of pulling back and protecting himself
through a controlled environment dominated by robots, on the other. His
expression of hatred and hopelessness about his parents finds some beings
(awesome robots) that might be able to do as he wishes and not make him feel
out of control. Yet he may also be elaborating images of how he felt his parents
were to him and how they wanted him to respond. The material was more
verbalized, more coherent and more traceable in terms of signs of expressive-
ness and defense. I was able to form hypotheses, if not form conclusions.
I was in a strikingly different position in my listening as Mr. M’s analyst in
this hour than had been the case through the early parts of his analysis. Earlier,
I had mostly found myself forced to imagine Mr. M’s inner life, his feelings and
fantasies—my constructions of Mr. M during the most frustrating periods of
our earlier work (for each of us) were largely related to facts about his life that
I’d learned about, hypotheses that I’d formed about the ways that his experi-
ence would be likely to make him feel. During this hour, there are, of course,
still many elements of this kind of listening, but now I am listening to his
associations; my thoughts have a slightly more knowable rhythm, and I can
construct something about the Mr. M whom I feel in a less virtual and hypo-
thetical way.
LaFarge (2004) discussed what she referred to as “fantasies of the imaginer

and the imagined” (p591). She explicated how fantasies include a representation
of the parent who imagines the inner world of the child; a representation of the
child who communicates his experience for the parent to imagine; and a repre-
sentation of the effect that the parent’s imagining of the child’s inner world has
upon it. Fantasies of the imaginer and imagined emerge in analytic work, since
in some sense they are central to the analytic task—analysis is a crucible for
constructing a view of the patient’s fantasies and constructed experience about
how she was and was not seen, understood and responded to. In fact, as
LaFarge suggests, these fantasies comprise a great deal of what is at the center
of constructing the patient’s psychic reality as well as the patient and analyst
reconciling this psychic reality with external reality.
Given that transference arises, in part, from a special set of fantasies about
the way in which the child’s inner world is shaped by interactions with the
parent who tries to imagine it (LaFarge, 2004), there are particular problems for
patients who feel that the parent is unable or unwilling to imagine it. In some
instances, silence constitutes a defense against hostile and aggressive feelings
toward the parent who imagines the child in limited and circumscribed ways in
accordance with that parent’s wishes. The analyst is in a unique position for
patients whose silence represents various forms of compromise formation
between the terror of being hurt by the parent or hurting the parent.
In a sense, as Mr. M begins speaking more freely, I am less forced to ima-
gine. I feel stimulated to imagine. I believe that for Mr. M, the parental repre-
sentation is partly one who could not imagine him having the freedom to speak
his mind. Mr. M had come to believe that in some specific ways, his own ima-
gination as driver was dangerous and alienating to his parents. Mr. M’s silence
had perhaps constituted a defense in which he protected himself from experi-
encing a parent who is limited in imagining his inner world (e.g., LaFarge,
2004). Perhaps my increased freedom to imagine and associate to Mr. M’s
words is consistent with his increased freedom to allow me to hear his words
and to speak about their meaning.
I realized during this hour that I was unusually excited to hear Mr. M ver-
balizing more than during nearly our first year of analytic work despite the fact
that this had been gradually changing. He seemed in my mind to be emerging
from a place of nonverbalized retreat, and in this emergence, I felt a divide
between my sense of excitement about this emergence and being the recipient of
what was emerging—his disappointment, hostility, and sadness about what
he’d experienced from humans (parents and me).
When a patient has been largely silent, it is often particularly stimulating to
hear their words. In this session, I found myself excited by his use of the term
schwang wang wang. During the hour, my reverie went in the direction of
recollections as a child of hearing or thinking of a new way to say something or
refer to someone and the sense of power when it would take hold in my small
group of friends. So schwang wang wang had an element of homoerotic
excitement for me; it seemed to stimulate a sense that Mr. M and I had a way
of talking that was both overlapping with and outside conventional language.
I believe that as we began talking about schwang wang wang, Mr. M was
introducing new forms of linguistic play and in some ways moving away from a
mode of meta-observation. Ferro (2005) refers to the analyst’s attempts to use
language that the analyst uses in the form of “co-narrative transformation” in
contrast to “meta-discourse.” Ferro’s discussion also relates to the analyst being
a transformative container in which there is potential for transformation in
both the contained and container. Mr. M and I, in using the language of
schwang wang wang, are transforming verbal inhibition into a transitional
form of communication and linguistic play.
I was struck throughout the hour and after by how much my enthusiasm for
Mr. M’s talking seemed split off from my sense of being the target of his anger,
fear and anxiety in the transference, except as I think about and step back from
the process. While I could easily understand his references to how terrible
humans were as an allusion to his parents and to me, an elaboration of
destructive elements of his internalized objects, the sense of enthusiasm for this
expressiveness reflected a level of dissociation and enactment on my part. I
believe that in wanting Mr. M to be more expressive, regardless of my openness
to the content of what was being expressed, there is a darker side to my
virtue—that I am in some sense enacting the role of someone who wants him to
be who I want him to be as an analytic patient.
I believe that my own slightly manic sense of excitement about his expres-
siveness and slightly disconnected stance in relation to the obvious negative
transference involved an unconscious attempt to exclude or distinguish myself
from one part of Mr. M’s internal objects—the rejected and controlling par-
ents. My sense of pain for them as parents was difficult to bear whenever I
thought about them. I have some very personal generational associations to this
pain, since my own father withdrew from his very strongly religious upbring-
ing. I had realized years ago that despite my religious proclivities being aligned
with my father’s, in my mind, it was an act of attempted murder. I didn’t want
to be murdered by Mr. M, and I didn’t want his parents to be murdered, nor
did I want Mr. M to be murdered by being someone other than whom he felt
himself to be. In Mr. M’s world, either he escaped at the cost of feeling sub-
merged or was murdered by parents or me by not being able to be himself. Yet
during this hour, there is chasm between my excitement about his emergence
through verbalization and Mr. M’s most hostile feelings.
Session two
This session occurred on the next day, Tuesday. Mr. M again uncharacter-
istically began the session by speaking. He was going to be beginning an exam
period and was concerned about one of his subjects that he feared would be a
difficult final exam. He described not being able to easily follow the lecturer’s
speaking style and relying on reading the textbook quite carefully. (I associated
to whether he was telling me that I didn’t know how to speak to him, how to
make contact or be understood by him.) He then told me, “Anthony and I cre-
ated a new society at school. It was fun. It’s called ‘I Fuck Your Deity (ima-
ginary) in the Ass with My Huge (real) Penis.’” My initial reactions to this new
society that Mr. M and his friend were forming were twofold. I felt alarmed
that he would offend a few other students and that his school might view this
society as violating codes of conduct in terms of respecting racial and religious
differences among students. I also thought it was somewhat funny as a joke and
filled with meaning for us to examine. Rather than continue to listen, I very
uncharacteristically and irrepressibly said, “Are you being careful about how
your fun is being understood by everyone else?” He said, in a mocking way,
“Yes, I’m being careful.”
Mr. M was smiling and laughing about his newly found idea and about the
concern that it stirred up in me. Indeed, within a moment of telling me of the
society name, Mr. M said that a senior tutor immediately told them that they
would not be able to list it. The tutor had taken it with good humor but made
it clear that it would have no traction in terms of being advertised as a society
at the college. It seemed clear that Mr. M knew this from the get-go but had
not let on about this with me.
His associations went to how he and Anthony have recently been poking fun
and flirting with a girl in his class whom Mr. M likes. She is of foreign
nationality though born in the US, and whenever they see her, they say hello
Muhammad. She laughs and is playful with him about this joke. She is going to
be available for an auction in terms of raising money for a political cause that
she believes in, and he is considering trying to bid for a lunch with her at the
auction. I say, “She who goes as Muhammad, is easier to ask to lunch than she
who has a real name. Still, you are thinking of taking that risk.” Yes, he says,
and I can see him smiling kind of an impish smile, like he’s getting away with
something. Mr. M grows quiet and then says, “I knew that they wouldn’t let us
create a society with that name. How could you not know that?” He pauses and
says, “I feel that if I am bidding for Muhammad, as you like to call her [he is
making a joke here, as though I am calling her this rather than he; I find this
rather funny and clever on his part], it was ok because it is an auction. I’m
covered.” I say, “So in each situation you feel safe showing something—with
your anger toward the deity lovers and your wishes for this woman if there is
protection or cover.”
He said, “It was kind of funny when you seemed worried about the society.
You’re like my mother, only I don’t really care in the same way and you’re less
intense, not crazy like she would get.” I told him that he seemed also annoyed
that I was concerned about it, as though maybe I was meddling too much or
interfering with him. He said, “It was kind of silly on your part to get worried
about it, but I guess they could do something draconian about it if they’d
wanted to.” I said, “People can get draconian about speaking one’s mind about
religion.” He said that he kind of liked seeing me get worried, but he didn’t
understand it. I wondered with him if in some way he wished to stir up my
concern and then minimize it. It was a less dangerous form of play and repeti-
tion in which at some level I became concerned about his speaking his mind,
but the stakes were low—I had no real power or authority, and it was his
responsibility about whether he formed this society or not. He said, “Yes, none
of it is very serious. I thought that that was obvious.” I felt a bit shamed,
unable to understand his playfulness, even though consciously I felt enjoyment
and playfulness when he brought it up. Somehow at that moment I’d moved
from receiving and containing his hostility and playfulness into a level of anxi-
ety and enactment about restricting him. I think that I knew that on another
level, Mr. M’s rage, anxiety and sadness about these matters of belief were
quite painful and that he disavowed any participation in stirring things up.
There was a much more violent story that had yet to be told, and we had
enacted an element of projected anxiety about his expressiveness.
As I listened during the remainder of the session, I realize that along with my
concern for him and anxiety, I had felt a bit gleeful about this society he
wanted to form that will never be formed. He is putting into words a complex
set of feelings about his family and his history. I very slightly had chuckled, I
think partly out of anxiety about the level of aggression and hostility that Mr.
M expressed toward others who believe in a deity. Perhaps the excitement
about his society is a bit like the excitement of schwang wang wang (another
different kind of moment of penis talk). My excitement about his capacity for
expressiveness seems split off from my thoughts, silent words and reverie rela-
ted to fear about his incurring punishment.
As his silence continues and the hour concludes, my thoughts move into a
very different level of formulation and discourse. I have a feeling as this session ends
that something has changed in our process together. I am beginning to be invited
into Mr. M’s internal world in a way that is communicated about through
words. I feel as though a different part of our analytic process has begun.
Discussion of session two

During this hour as I listen to Mr. M, I felt relatively freer to think and con-
struct a sense of Mr. M’s subjective experience and internal objects. One of my
speculations about the first eight months of his relative silence is that he feared
his own aggressive and hostile feelings might destroy our own “societal” ana-
lytic work. Yet in some ways, I had been more attuned to his fear that I would
control his mind and that his silence protected him from this possibility. As the
material in this and the previous session emerged, it became more clear how
afraid Mr. M was of losing control—how much he wished to be contained by
me and by his senior tutor. He was likely withholding parts of his mind that
could lead to repetitive ruptures, even at the cost of his shame and sense of
futility about not having access to his words. He was now taking a greater risk
that I might misunderstand him. The transaction is also a muted form of what
would happen later in the analysis in which through projective identification he
would invite or construct me as a worried or prohibitive parent who stood in
the way of his expressiveness.
For example, when I worried that he would be punished, I realized that this
was the enactment and manifestation of an internalized object relationship in
which he is punished for his feelings. I was worried that he would be repeating
an experience of feeling misunderstood and cast away for what he believed in
while at the same time acting as a prohibitive other. This occurred on several
occasions as the analysis began to develop.
In this hour, Mr. M has begun to more actively form words around his
angry, destructive feelings. I think of Mr. M as creating a metaphor through the
words of his society. He is, as with schwang wang wang, letting me know
about the deep musicality (Gratier & Trevarthen, 2008) of his representational
world, a communication that stands in contrast to aspects of his non-relatedness
(Modell, 1975, 2011; Winnicott, 1963) so present in earlier parts of his analysis.
The words of the society are important in many regards. I think that his
“huge real penis” represents many things that he wants his parents to see—his
sexuality and masculinity, his aggression, and his real mind. He wanted his
parents to see what was real in him, distinct and not seen through their deity or
in relation to their deity. He seems to be expressing pride in his penis and
phallic authority, yet there is also a kind of obvious compensatory phallic pride
(e.g., Corbett, 2001; Gomberg, 1981; Josephs, 1997; Kavka, 1976), one that
conceals his actual anxiety about the opposite sex and a fear of exposure to
rejection. I believe that Mr. M’s “huge real penis” is partly a way of referring to
his hypertrophied intellect in relation to his sense of being overwhelmed with
his phallic strivings and anxiety about pursuit of women.
The notion of creating a “society” (after all, society is a group in a civilized
world) for his rage, hatred and contempt involves the search for a sympathetic
or affirming object that will receive these feelings and ultimately contain them.
His hatred has a safe place, but it is not safe in that moment for me. I believe
that in addition to my own feelings about both religious fervor and rejection of
religion, I am invited to be a bit worried by Mr. M. While I acted impulsively
as he relayed the story and might have more productively continued to listen, he
had not conveyed the story in a way that might have allowed me to hear it with
less concern. Then he witnessed my anxiety, a micro-version of the destructive
patterns of expression that incurred rage and impasse with his parents. I believe
that it was important that Mr. M could feel my anxiety in this relatively benign
context in which he was not destroyed, just as he knew that others at school
would contain him from doing something destructive. He is able to survive my
impulsive attempt to unnecessarily protect him and the school’s attempt to
reflect reality to him without destroying him. Perhaps my enacted concern
about his society is a good enough misunderstanding or good enough impinge-
ment (Cooper, 2000, 2010b).
I viewed this form of acting out on my part as something that Mr. M partly
contributed to by inviting me as a worried and forcibly prohibiting parent who
he then could mock in the face of some of his own embarrassment about
exposing his own longings (e.g., Riesenberg-Malcolm, 1999; Steiner, 2006b,
2011). These patterns of enacting elements of a longstanding internalized rela-
tionship in which his expressiveness was met with criticism became more ana-
lyzable over the course of his analysis.
In this hour, Mr. M is attempting to put some of the deracination he has
experienced into words. He is doing it collaboratively with Anthony at school

and with me. He is open to and perhaps welcoming the governance by his
senior tutors and fellows. He is being violent and angry in the context of others.
He wishes to be heard, monitored and metabolized. As De Beistegui (2010) has
stated, his metaphors reflect efforts to develop narratives and open up potential
space and meaning in search of a sympathetic object.
Within the transference, at an unconscious level, he is afraid that he will be
forced and coerced by me with my imaginary deity or that he would like to do
this to his parents’ imaginary deity or mine. Yet what I feel more in the coun-
tertransference is less a sense of our enmity and danger and more that I am
enthusiastic about his expressiveness. As with the previous session, I am suspi-
cious of this enthusiasm, even as it makes a great deal of sense to me that these
are welcome developments for Mr. M. There is likely a developmentally early
sense of loving and appreciating Mr. M’s productions, perhaps a welcoming of
his phallic strivings, but there is also a kind of pre-conscious wish on my part
to avoid being in this position of hurting him or him hurting me, of penetrating
without permission.
In my states of excitement about his expressiveness, I believe that I am
selectively responding to Mr. M’s penis talk in terms of a homoerotic welcom-
ing of Mr. M, enthusiastic about his romantic adventures in contrast to the
aggressive elements of his penis as unwelcome penetrator and abuser of his
parents and my ideologies. I am now beginning to see how in various ways I
have enacted elements of Mr. M’s internalized object world of being a more
punitive and constraining object self and fearing such from others. There is a
split between the parents who were critical and controlling and the parent who
welcomes Mr. M’s thoughts and feelings. In my concern and anxiety about the
repercussions of his action, I am in the role of being invited as the prohibitive
other who tells him not to feel or post what he wishes. I begin to understand
that the two feelings that I am having make a bit more sense now—that Mr. M
wants to express his rage about being told what to believe and wants to feel
safe and contained. He wishes to be contained by his senior tutors and me
regarding his rage or through the camouflage of an auction in extending his
romantic vulnerability. He wants to be listened to but not scrutinized and
evaluated. The useful and destructive functions of parental encouragement and
limit-setting have been enacted between us, and I am trying to understand this
enactment.
A pattern repeated itself several times in this new phase of analysis, one in
which I could feel Mr. M inviting me as an object who was concerned about his
expressions of aggression and independence. In stops and starts, I worked hard
at developing signals about drawing Mr. M’s attention to familiar ways that he
chose to stir up me and others to contain or prohibit him. This allowed him to
further investigate his own considerable anxiety about sexual and aggressive
feelings that motivated his attempts to enact these feelings with me. In some
sense, I became less preoccupied with my role in facilitating his emergence from
relative silence to that of an analyst increasingly attuned to his involvement

with me as an object in his internalized world.
Conclusion
As Fairbairn (1952) highlighted, for many schizoid individuals, the fear that
one’s love will destroy is crucial, and the “internal saboteur” punishes for
wanting anything from another. Steiner’s (1993, 2011) body of work has devel-
oped our understanding of these dangers for the schizoid patient whose retreat
from desire and hostility feels as much like preservative as destructive action.
For many schizoid individuals, verbal expressiveness is anathema because it is
unconsciously equated with object seeking. For some patients, withdrawal and
silence may become potent tools to redress the problem that if speaking has led
to faulty assumptions about being known, then speaking is not safe. Speaking is
also sometimes unconsciously equated with aggressive action. In some sense,
the patient’s wish for love, curiosity and engagement with the other, including
loving and hostile feelings, is muted (literally nearly muted), and aliveness is
more conjured by the analyst rather than expressed by the patient. The analyst
is asked to contain and hold the patient’s inability to speak, since this inability
often involves the disavowed wish to seek or ask of others. The analyst is
required to grasp the patient’s minimal use of language “alongside and beyond
what he is saying” (Joseph, 1985, p447). For Mr. M, relatedness and aliveness
were not completely absent but were instead in a state of quite active conflict
with the fear of being angry, controlled, or disappointed by others.
The analyst may imagine the patient’s aliveness and needs as he gets to know
his patient, but it is also worth considering that these imaginings are highly lim-
ited and may even represent counter-resistance to understanding the patient’s
deadness and abject object world (LaFarge, 2004). To the extent that the
patient’s object world can be imagined, it often lacks shape and form (Civitarese,
2015). The analyst is forced to guess about what the patient feels or what his
sparse forms of speech might mean as allusions to his internalized object world
and the analytic relationship. Relative silence is more the order of the day, and the
musicality of language is more imagined than “heard,” as it were. In the transi-
tion from silence to more expressiveness, inferences about the reasons for relative
silence move from being quite experience-distant in the transference-counter-
transference to being more visible and knowable by both patient and analyst.
The transition from states that feature verbal inhibition and silence to greater
expressive freedom pose particular problems for the analyst. In instances when
the analyst’s unwitting investment in the patient’s increased expressiveness
becomes split off from the patient’s recruitment of the analyst as an internal
object, the analyst must work toward integrating the variety of experiences that
are being communicated in the transference. Some relatively subtle cues involve
the analyst’s tendency toward “either/or thinking” (Kris, 1990) in his formula-
tions. There are often less subtle instances of enactment that cue the analyst
into his continuing splitting. For example, my anticipatory fear about what
would happen to Mr. M if he created his society was driven by a wish for
containment that Mr. M elicited in me; at the same time, it involved a projec-
tion of my own anxiety about being the target of his fears about ways that we
might hurt each other.
For the patient who is relatively silent during early phases of analysis or later
as well, it is important for the analyst to in a certain sense “curb his enthu-
siasm” about the patient’s relative freedom to speak. We can easily overvalue
what these words might mean at the particular point of increased expressive-
ness. As we know, speaking is not communicating, and it is important to value
the communicative function of silence as well as the defensive element of
speech. As time went on with Mr. M, and as he became more and more verbal,
I felt a profound sense about how much of Mr. M’s unconscious experience
remained unclear. Civitarese (2011) has usefully emphasized the notion of
metaphor as a transient construction of words told to the analyst in the present
for a particular reason that will continue to reveal itself.
In the absence of words during the silent phase of this treatment, I was
focused on a story that was wrenching, partly because of Mr. M’s violent
separation from his parents. Mr. M’s separation was also complicated by the
fact that elements of separation from parents are an intrinsic part of young
adulthood, as is the task of integrating elements of dependence and autonomy.
Mr. M’s sense of disruption was a large part of the treatment as we began. The
analysis itself was a part of this deracination, both helping with his uprooting
and helping him integrate elements of his separation from his parents. Yet this
dominant metaphor of rupture and perhaps even conspiracy in the transference-
countertransference through wishes to facilitate expressiveness became an
obstruction to my own way of thinking about his capacities to express both
dependence and hostility. These forms of working with and working through
the analyst’s counter-resistance are often an important part of analytic progress.
References
Botella, S., & Botella, C. (2005). The Work of Psychic Figurability: Mental States without
Representation. London: Brunner/Routledge.
Bromberg, P. M. (1995). Resistance, object usage, and human relatedness. Contemporary
Civitarese, G. (2011). The Intimate Room: Theory and Technique of the Analytic Field.
London: Routledge.
Civitarese, G. Transformations in hallucinosis and the receptivity of the analyst.
Cooper, S. (2000). Objects of Hope: Exploring Possibility and Limit in Psychoanalysis.
Hillsdale, NJ: Analytic Press.
Cooper, S. (2010a). Self-criticism and unconscious grandiosity: Transference-counter-
transference dimension. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 91, 1115–1136.
Cooper, S. (2010b). A Disturbance in the Field: Essays in Transference-Counter-
transference. New York, NY: Routledge.

Corbett, K. (2001) Faggot=loser. Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 2: 3–28.
De Beistegui (2010). Per un’estetica della metafora. In D. Ferrari & P. Godani (Eds.), La
sartorial di Proust. Pisa, Italy: Edizioni ETS.
Director, L. (2009). The enlivening object. Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 45: 120–141.
Feldman, M. (1994). Projective identification in phantasy and enactment. Psychoanalytic
Inquiry, 14: 423–440.
Feldman, M. (1999). The defensive use of compliance. Psychoanalytic Inquiry, 19:
22–39.
Ferro, A. (2005). Seeds of Illness, Seeds of Recovery: The Genesis of Suffering and the
Role of Psychoanalysis. London: Routledge.
Freud, S. (1912). The dynamics of transference. In J. Strachey (Ed. & Trans.), The
Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 12,
pp97–107). London, UK: Hogarth Press.
Gomberg, H. L. (1981). A note on the phallic significance of spitting. Psychoanalytic
Gratier, M., & Trevarthen, C. (2008). Musical narratives and motives for culture in
mother-infant vocal interaction. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 15: 122–158.
Josephs, L. (1997). The view from the tip of the iceberg. Journal of the American
Kavka, J. (1976). The analysis of phallic narcissism. International Review of
LaFarge, L. (2004). The imaginer and the imagined. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 73:
591–625.
Inquiry, 11: 147–171.
Modell, A. H. (1975). A narcissistic defense against affects and the illusion of self-sufficiency.
Modell, A. H. (2011). The unconsciously constructed virtual other. Psychoanalytic
Dialogues, 21: 292–302.
Ornstein, A. (1995). The fate of the curative fantasy in the psychoanalytic treatment
process. Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 31: 113–123.
Riesenberg-Malcolm, R. (1999). Two ways of experiencing shame. Paper presented at
the 41st International Psychoanalytical Association Congress, Santiago, Chile.
Rosenfeld, H. (1987). Impasse and Interpretation: Therapeutic and Anti-Therapeutic
Stein, M. (1981). The unobjectionable part of the transference. Journal of the American
Psychoanalytic Association, 29, 869–892.
Steiner, J. (1993). Psychic retreats: Pathological Organizations of the Personality in Psy-

chotic, Neurotic and Borderline Patients. London, UK: Routledge.
Steiner, J. (2006a). Interpretive enactments and the analytic setting. International Journal
of Psychoanalysis, 87: 315–320.
Steiner, J. (2006b). Seeing and being seen: Narcissistic pride and narcissistic humiliation.
Routledge.
Winnicott, D. W. (1963). Communicating and not communicating, leading to study of
certain opposites. In The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment
(pp171–192). New York, NY: International University Press.
Winnicott, D. W. (1969). The use of an object. International Journal of Psychoanalysis,
50: 711–716.
Chapter 5
The analyst’s object relationship to

the psychoanalytic process
As I begin to revisit the analyst’s relationship to the analytic process (both

Parsons, 2007, and Cooper, 2010a, 2010b, have written papers on this subject),
including his or her transference to the analytic process, it is worth asking this
question: “Why talk about a relationship to the process as opposed to our
relationship to our specific patient and our own minds in understanding the
patient?” Is it making something more abstract than specific, and if so, how
could this be helpful?
This is a good question. My answer to it is that actually our relationship to
the process is often an additional encumbrance or aid in understanding our
patient. The analyst’s countertransference to his patient and to the process of
psychoanalysis are all parts of a whole in terms of how we can help to under-
stand what our patient is expressing that she might not know that she is
expressing. So I want to insist on the idea that we have a complex object rela-
tionship with our field, our work, our own analysis, our supervision, and our
institutions, which is useful to understand when working with our patient.
While there is widespread understanding that much of psychoanalytic work is
self-analysis in relation to our patients, there has been relatively less focus on
the notion that countertransference feelings and fantasies about the process are
an essential part of our tool set in understanding our patients.
We know how much time we spend with our patients analyzing the feelings,
fantasies and ideas about their insistence that the analytic relationship or process
be in accord with what they wish rather than what they can actually have. It’s a
form of the paranoid-schizoid position, one in which the patient is continually
insisting that the process resemble or fall in line with their fantasies and wishes.
This insistence is nearly the opposite to grieving and accepting incompleteness
and limitation. Psychoanalysts are also vulnerable to the same kind of projec-
tion of fantasy on to the analytic situation and this sometimes manifests itself in
resistance to understanding and helping.
I have had such a rich and complex relationship to the field of psycho-
analysis, filled with passion, gratitude, excitement, fun and idealization—along
with disillusionment, ambivalence, frustration and concern. In many ways, my
relationship with my patients has been steadier or perhaps easier than with the
The analyst’s object relationship to the psychoanalytic process 83
field of analysis. While my countertransference reactions to patients are widely

variable, I have never felt much actual ambivalence about clinical work. I’ve
always appreciated it, even when I am saddened or frustrated by my own con-
siderable limitations. So perhaps, like most papers that psychoanalysts write in
our field, this chapter gives me an opportunity to try to work out some of my
own problems and sources of resistance in analytic work. In the process, I hope
that I might stimulate you to think about these questions in your own work.
A personal vignette
I began thinking about the analyst’s relationship to the analytic process at the
very beginning of my training. As a clinical psychologist beginning my psycho-
analytic training in 1980 I was asked to complete a special set of applications
for beginning the clinical training. I didn’t have to sign any special kind of
waivers as is a popular myth but it was a degrading experience for me since I
had been passionately reading and learning about psychoanalysis on my own
for five previous years. My reading had taken me from Freud to British Object
Relations theory, in particular, including Klein, Winnicott, Balint, Guntrip and
Fairbairn. Then I read many ego psychologists, particularly Schafer and then on
to Kohut as well. I began my training with a relatively strong background in
psychoanalysis and at the same time my medical classmates were able to begin
to see cases without special applications.
So I began my training with a sense of envy and anger about these matters
combined with strong interests in seeing patients as part of my training. I knew
how much I loved clinical work and I desperately wanted to improve my work.
So I began my training with a sense that I was from the wrong side of the
tracks, regarded by some as coming from an inferior background combined
with my own sense of being actually equal or superior at least in terms of pas-
sion and interest in psychoanalysis.
While I enjoyed my clinical training, my classmates, and had a wonderful
group of supervisors who supported me fully in my work, when I completed
training I had a very hard time letting go of my anger and resentment about this
early beginning. In some ways I felt permanently lodged in an angry, somewhat
adolescent relationship to authority. All the things that irritated me about
institutional psychoanalysis (and realistically there are things that likely irritate
us all) were exacerbated and it was harder to accept the limitations of orga-
nized psychoanalysis. It made it more difficult for me to be enthusiastic about
participation in institutional activities at a local, national and international level
despite a largely welcoming attitude from colleagues. While I am by nature
probably somewhat predisposed to be on my own I have no doubt that my
sense of injury and anger made it more difficult to engage in my affiliation with
the analytic community.
So for me, clinical psychoanalysis actually became a refuge from this set of
feelings or, more accurately, provided a fantasy of refuge. I wanted analytic
84 The analyst’s object relationship to the psychoanalytic process
work to provide me a safe haven from my anger toward authority and my sense
of not being seen as a legitimate analyst by some who feared the barbarians at
the gate.
It was particularly difficult at times to think about patients’ allusions to me
as a parental authority in contrast to my ability to see the patients’ libidinal
longings for me as parent. For example, in seeing psychoanalytic candidates and
non-candidates, I had to try to listen for siding with them against authority (the
external bad objects) rather than thinking about these bad authority figures as
directed toward me in the transference. The propensity toward a mutually held

bad object held the allure and fantasy of keeping bad objects out of analytic
work. Naturally, I am describing elements of my training that added to an
existing psychological history and early life that made me predisposed to have
conflicts with authority. It was too easy to avoid the patient’s communications
about rivalry and hostility. At other times I had to watch for overcorrecting for
this problem resulting in hypervigilance toward noting the patient’s competitive
and aggressive feelings.
These matters will never be “resolved” for me in my work but I make pro-
gress in working with this set of feelings. I have become increasingly impressed
with how our propensities for idealizing or devaluing the field of psychoanalysis
or its institutions are always woven into the transference–counter-tranference
matrix.
Some theoretical background

The concept of analytic process is broad and includes how we think about
analysis as a form of therapy, our feelings about therapeutic action effected my
ability, and our experiences of our own analysis and that process. Our relationship
to analytic process includes our history in relationship to previous treatments that
we’ve provided and received—in other words, where we are in the stage of our
analytic career. It also includes our relationship to theory or theories of
psychoanalysis.
One of the major issues related to our relationship to the analytic process
includes how we view ourselves in helping our patients: more doctor, more
scientist, or more artist? How do we feel about the exploration of mystery,
reaching for mystery, and how does our opacity as analysts help or hinder the
process? Are we primarily trying to provide symptomatic relief or greater
understanding? Do we view our work as embedded within a particular theore-
tical orientation or not? Are we a maverick in relationship to our theory or a
follower? Is the analytic process our parent that we learn from or defer to, or
do we have a more parental relationship to the analytic process in which we
guide and, at times, require that the process defer to our judgment?
It has occurred to me that many analysts may actually seek refuge in clinical
work through a kind of fantasy in which it is separate or divorced from our
feelings about institutions or theoretical orientations. I think that it is just
that—a fantasy—because these fields or dimensions, as it were, are always

intersecting with the clinical and personal elements of our participation in the
analytic process.
In a letter to Fliess and later in his paper on transference love, Freud (1909)
emphasized that psychoanalysis, in his words, is not an entirely “healthy” job
(p210). As Friedman put it in a 2007 paper, it is not what would ordinarily be
called an altogether wholesome job—at least as one that the general populace
recognizes. As Friedman (2007) articulated so well, many features of the fra-
mework of psychoanalysis involving various rituals, trappings, frequency and

regularity of sessions tend to both stimulate and titrate illusion. As a profes-
sion, we truck in the knowledge that there is always danger between productive
and problematic illusion in analytic work.
As the progenitor of the therapy, Freud had a special relationship to the
analytic process that Parsons (2007) has beautifully captured by exploring some
of Freud’s countertransference in his treatment of Herr E. This patient was
frequently mentioned in Freud’s letters to Fliess. Freud reveals that Herr E’s
earliest memories seemed to confirm so well some of his ideas about the origin
of symptoms. Freud also tells Fliess that his work with Herr E additionally
helped Freud in a personal way to cure his own railway phobia. Parsons
underscores the extent to which Freud’s feelings about his own work and his
sense of self-worth as an analyst were riding on the outcome of his treatment of
Herr E. Freud suffered from depression and anxiety as a response to slow pro-
gress with Herr E, but in the end, his failure to help Herr E through discovering
the origin of his symptoms gave rise to Freud’s discovery of the analyst’s need
for free-floating attention. At the point that he abandoned his early view of
therapeutic action (discovery of the origin of symptoms as curative) in his
treatment of Herr E, Freud says that he felt despairing about his work and that
at such times, he felt that “every single one of my patients is a tormenting spirit
to me” (Jones, 1954, pp311–312). In so doing, he revealed both an intense
negative countertransference, not only to Herr E, but also to the analytic
process—indeed, to the fact of being an analyst, and of course especially as its
inventor.
It is widely accepted (e.g., Harris, 2011; Parsons, 2006; Schafer, 2003) that in
the act of doing analysis and therapy, the same conflicts that give rise to basic
counter-transferences and that demarcate an analyst’s areas of potential liabil-
ities simultaneously serve as the wellspring for that analyst’s unique intuitive
and therapeutic capacities. Furthermore, many of these complex counter-trans-
ferences that operate in clinical work have contributed to our choice of a ther-
apeutic career. Both Searles (1979) and Annie Reich (1951) along with countless
practitioners have linked the capacity for countertransference as a necessary
prerequisite of being an analyst.
Analysts from a variety of contemporary traditions (e.g., Cooper, 1997;
Mitchell, 1988; Parsons, 2006, 2007; Smith, 2003) have elaborated on how the
analytic process mobilizes unconscious conflicts and anxiety in the analyst, not
just at certain times or with certain patients, but by its nature. By its nature, the
attempt by the analyst to listen associatively stimulates conflicts that are evoked
by memories, thoughts and affect. Several years ago, I wrote a paper (Cooper,
2010a) about our conflicts related to actually being an object of transference—
not so much countertransference to a particular patient, but more a matter of
how we actually feel about being objects of transference in analytic work. The
fact that transference is a lynchpin concept in psychoanalytic technique, and
more broadly that the patient’s relationship to us is coterminous with learning
about his inner life, does not mean that we don’t have feelings and conflicts
about the matter or that they will be resolved through our own analyses. It is
one thing to declare by fiat or dedication our belief that analyzing transference
is useful in psychoanalysis. It is another thing to bear and understand intense
transference love and hate.
It is this intrinsic involvement of our conflicts in the act of analytic work that
makes it difficult for us to even find a suitable vocabulary for understanding the
notion of trial and error or “mistakes” in the course of analytic work. Within
the frame of an analyst and patient working together, we are generally dedi-
cated to the idea that the patient is doing the best that she can. Our feelings
about our patient’s limitations and our own obstacles, mistakes or even dis-
appointment regarding the patient’s growth or capacity to reach goals requires
a new vocabulary, perhaps a new set of constructs for describing analytic pro-
cess. In the 1990s, as psychoanalysts were making a transition from a more
absolute authority associated with being an analyst to the notion of “inter-
pretive fallibility” (Cooper, 1996), it was not uncommon to see even among
papers that argued for a constructivist view of reality, references to the analyst’s
“mistakes” (e.g., Chused & Raphling, 1992; Cooper, 1996). But the more
sophisticated we become about the nature of analytic work that is always
intrinsically tied to the analyst’s participation, the more this terminology seems
problematic and ill-suited to describing intersubjective processes in analytic
work. Concepts such as the inevitability of enactment have made us understand
more than before that understanding is always partial and is always in a
catching up process with the mind of the patient and analyst.
In fact, I no longer find it particularly useful to think about analytic work as
involving mistakes, except in the context of gross technical errors and, of course,
in terms of questionable ethical decisions (see Chapter 8). There are many clinical
decisions that I would take back if I could, but generally speaking, these deci-
sions are based on the best available understanding at a particular moment. Or
I would use the term mistakes in the way that the abstract expressionist painter
Robert Motherwell (2007, p27) wrote about it in his descriptions of the artist in
abstract expressionism, as a term implying a form of psychic play:
I begin a painting with a series of mistakes. The painting comes out of the
correction of mistakes by feeling. I begin with shapes and colors which are
not related internally nor to the external world; I work without images.
Ultimate unifications come about through modulations of the surface by

innumerable trials and efforts. The final picture is the process arrested at
the moment when what I was looking for flashes into view.
As an alternative to thinking about gross errors simply as mistakes, I think that

most analysts who are working productively try to understand the nature of
their ‘mistake’ in terms of its meaning and how it might be useful to under-
standing the patient in a deeper way. In a sentence, an appreciation for the
intrinsically elusive achievement of the depressive position through analytic

work includes integrating our hopes and acceptance of incompleteness; inte-
grating our forms of idealization and disappointment in relationship to others
and ourselves; and holding and bearing our conflicts.
The depressive position is not a sexy outcome, and it can be a hard sell. It
requires an appreciation for the pathos of life, what the Japanese refer to as
mono no aware, “the slender sadness.” Yet, for psychoanalysts who are
engaged in this work, we know that the capacity to help people better accept
who they are and what they have experienced is an extraordinary psychic
achievement. We know that as analysts and human beings, we fail, and in my
opinion, very good analysts of different stripes have ways of compassionately
and humanely understanding that in Beckett’s (1984) words, “we try to fail
better” (p11). In my view, that is what patients who have successful analyses
are helped to experience with richness and appreciation, and what analysts who
live by this lofty goal (and I mean that word, lofty) are doing pretty well.
I conjecture that we as a field are now in a better position to hold a broader
and more realistic frame for integrating limitation and disappointment—as
analysts, to better hold the depressive position as a field. This does not mean
that this is without conflict and resistance but we may now have better access
and better permission established to think about limitation or disappointments
that exist in analyses that are going concerns. Most importantly, we have a
broader framework for understanding the analyst’s ongoing struggle as a kind
of “boundary artist” (see Chapter 8) between conscious and unconscious,
between concrete and symbolic, to make sense of what the patient might be
saying that she doesn’t know that she is saying.
Another of Parsons’s (2007) concepts that has been useful to me in thinking
about our relationship to the analytic process is the concept of the internal
analytic setting as a way of listening beyond countertransference. The internal
analytic setting is a psychic arena in which reality is defined by such concepts as
symbolism, fantasy, transference and unconscious meaning. These operate
throughout the mind, of course, but the point about the analyst’s internal setting
is that, within it, they are what constitute reality. Just as the external setting
defines and protects a spatiotemporal arena in which patient and analyst can
conduct the work of analysis, so the internal setting defines and protects an area
of the analyst’s mind where whatever happens, including what happens to the
external setting, can be considered from a psychoanalytic viewpoint.
We know that this belief in the internal analytic setting (or belief in the
process) is one that is based on our own analyses and, over time, the analyses
that we provide. It is the sum of our history of participation as patients and
analysts, and I will suggest it is constantly being stirred up in the course of
working with each patient. It is one of the most important tools that we have in
analytic work; it is a way to help describe the analyst as analytic listener to
himself. Parsons points out, and I agree, that this does not mean the analyst is
somehow using the analysis for the parasitic purpose of his own self-analysis; if
self-analysis is grounded in the analyst’s internal setting for a particular analy-

sis, what results from it for the analyst should help to illuminate our patient,
even as we do learn about ourselves in the process.
I turn to two brief clinical examples to illustrate something about how our
relationship to the theories of psychoanalysis and how the stage of our analytic
career—are all important frames for psychoanalytic work.
Dana and the analyst’s relationship to theory

This is a brief section of the early part of what my patient Dana and I regarded
as a successful though time-limited analysis. Dana is a quite successful gay
attorney, wife and mother of two girls, who had been sexually abused by her
father from ages 10 to 13. She was the younger of two children born into an
economically advantaged family. Dana’s brother was two years older. Her
father, born in another country, was a highly successful scientist and thought of
as a pillar within his religious and social community. He had been physically
abused as a young child by his mother (beaten and screamed at repeatedly), and
Dana had always felt a special closeness with her father’s sadness. He had
championed her interests and performance in sports and school. She idealized
her father while having little respect for her somewhat anxious mother, whom
she viewed as less bright and more superficial than her father. She felt deeply
loved by her father—that he understood who she was as a person, always an
exceptionally bright student—while she felt that her mother never knew much
about her friendships or school studies. Dana had felt that she was her father’s
favorite, though her older brother felt that she was his favorite. Dana fre-
quently laughed nervously about the irreconcilable realities of feeling that he
was attentive and supportive while he had regularly abused her.
Dana had always known and not fully allowed herself to feel the extent of
the abuse. Her father would come into their bedroom at night and enter her
vaginally from behind. He would leave by giving her a peck on the cheek, sort
of sealing the disavowal that his paternal function was restored and that the
abuse was contained and sealed in the envelope of his paternal function.
She came to see me for analysis because despite her successful home and
academic life, for years she would feel privately crazy when thinking about the
abuse. Previous psychotherapy in another city had been somewhat helpful but
not with the sense that she was privately crazy. Very occasionally, she took a lit
match to her arm when alone as a way to release rage and anger. She still was
close to her father and he close to her. Dana’s wife knew of the abuse but, like
Dana, didn’t really register the full force of its impact upon Dana. She believed
her but, according to Dana’s description, seemed strikingly unaffected by it.
From the beginning of the analysis, Dana’s idealization of me was featured.
She was tremendously appreciative of my ability to listen to her, to be patient
and to bear the feelings that were emerging in her. Her idealization and grati-
tude seemed to me a likely repetition in the transference of her idealizing rela-
tionship with her father. Despite her strong feminist leanings and rather low
expectations toward men in positions of power, Dana seemed somewhat
deferential to me. It saddened Dana when I didn’t answer some of her personal
questions about my life and instead drew her attention to the likely repetition
of seeking a special sense of intimacy with me, a special place in which I would
let her know me more personally than I would usually do with my patients. At
first, she adamantly rejected these interpretations, but over time, she became
more convinced that she had always done this with older male and female tea-
chers without always being consciously aware of this.
Several months into the analysis, Dana began telling me about particular
kinds of fantasies that she was having about me, which featured highly aggres-
sive and sadistic content. She was ashamed and excited about these fantasies
and quite worried that I would be upset about them or think that she was (in
her words) crazy. The fantasies included scenes like tarring and feathering me,
cutting off my penis, shooting arrows into my body, and whipping my back.
Each report of these kinds of fantasies was fraught with nervous laughter, dis-
claimers like, “I can’t believe I’m having these kinds of thoughts and fantasies.
I’m so sorry that you have to listen to this. I really like you. I really appreciate
our work together.” At other times, in reporting the fantasies, she would say
with some awareness that she was treating the fantasies as “real”: “I didn’t
mean to hurt you in this one, but [with nervous laughing] I guess I did if I’m
pouring tar over you.” Sometimes, she would lift her head up from the couch to
look at my reaction to these fantasies.
I viewed these fantasies as the emergence in the transference of a set of hos-
tile feelings toward her father that she had never allowed into her conscious-
ness. I talked to Dana about her attempts with me to disarm me, take away the
power that I had to hurt her, to castrate me and to possibly retaliate for some
of the things that were done to her. I suggested to her that in the context of this
relationship with me, she could feel some parts of her mind that had been bot-
tled up and contained. I tried to take up these fantasies in this way, and she
could see this as likely so. She remained deeply idealizing toward me and didn’t
experience any sense of conscious anger or disappointment toward me despite
my queries about these feelings.
I want to focus a bit on a quality of countertransference here that is subtle
but in my experience not without importance. Each time I tried to speak with
Dana about what she was allowing herself to experience in these fantasies
about hurting me, Dana kept returning to her gratitude toward me. At the time,
I viewed this gratitude as a forced repetition of compliance and the need to
idealize rather than be angry at her father and me. It felt driven by anxiety and
a compulsion to restore what I regarded as a paternal bond. Dana was on sev-
eral occasions very hurt and disappointed when I would see her idealization and
gratitude toward me as a clinging to the submissive idealization of her father.
She felt that I was being rigid and minimizing her gratitude. I told her that she
had always been loyal to her father as his confidante, and I was suggesting that
she was changing in allowing herself to have access to her angry feelings.
For many reasons of my own, I have held a mixture of admiration and
skepticism about much of Kohut’s metapsychology and theory of therapeutic
action. Some of my questioning has related to a concern that it can be a bit
patronizing toward patients. On the other hand, I believe that Kohut under-
stood some very important things about the many different functions of ideali-
zation beyond idealization as a defense against hostility. I also have an aversion
to being idealized falsely. I have the same aversion to hearing other analysts or
instances of my own work when someone is cultivating idealization. I began to
realize that my attachment to a certain kind of fear of missing something with
Dana’s defensive idealization and an attachment to a particular kind of theore-
tical position was getting in the way of seeing some of the other meanings of
Dana’s idealization of me.
I began to think about Dana's transference to me as more that of an appre-
ciative and emotionally present mother. I began to sense that what was being
expressed in the beginning parts of Dana’s analysis was a scene in which I was
the recipient of her wishes to protect herself from her father by hurting him,
disarming him, and retaliating against him, while having me as her mother bear
witness to this. I began to realize that much of this transference included ele-
ments of a maternal transference—the mobilization of a set of dormant wishes
to have a witness to what had happened to her, to be loved and understood and
protected by a mother that had long been unfulfilled in Dana’s childhood. Her
gratitude was directed less to me as a father who would absorb her anger than
a mother who could let herself know what was going on with Dana. I began to
think of how in certain ways I was rejecting Dana’s gratitude for this new
opportunity.
One could look at this brief vignette in many ways and explain it without
reference to anything to do with my relationship to psychoanalysis. One could
suggest that I failed to see the less conspicuous elements of maternal transfer-
ence given the content of these sadistic fantasies, her simultaneous protection
from her father and strong identification with her father. Generally, I’m not one
to glide over maternal types of transference directed to me. I believe that I was
submitting to a theoretical allegiance, a bias toward seeing idealization as a
defense against hostility because of some of my own biases. At some level, my
relationship to theory was interfering with my work with Dana. I’m reminded
of an analyst, Martin Cooperman, who in his work at Austen Riggs often said
that patients must lose their symptoms during analysis and analysts must lose
their theories.
It is always interesting to think, for example, about the extent to which we
become attached to our theories in psychoanalysis because they help guide us
through the confusing and perilous waters of clinical work or because they help
to narrow our field of vision in ways that provide the illusion that we know
what’s going on. Our relationship to theory is often quite complex as a kind of
object relationship. Are we loyal, monogamous partners? Are we the kind who
wants to play the field with regard to elevating pluralism? Do we submit to the
theory or bend the theory to who we are? These are always interesting ques-
tions to ask in connection with any piece of clinical analysis.
Marcus and the analyst’s relationship to progress

Marcus, aged 43, was a married professor and father of a young daughter when
he began analysis. He was extremely contemptuous and disappointed in me
from the get-go. His wife of three years was growing increasingly impatient
with his contemptuous attitudes with her, attitudes that alternated with being
more open and available. At still other times, he would become quite needy
toward his wife, particularly when he was in the midst of massively self-
deprecating episodes. Marcus was highly self-critical and felt that he had been
advantaged in every way, financially and intellectually, but had not been able to
utilize the opportunities afforded to him. His father and grandfather had been
highly successful in their business careers, and Marcus felt that he was small
and unimportant in comparison to the men in his life. He often would begin
writing academic papers and stop them because they weren’t going to be
“strong enough.” He would obsess after teaching a class about things that he
had said or not said and found teaching to be more a series of potential or
experienced land mines to step on than a place for imparting knowledge and
fostering exploration with his students.
Marcus’s mother was intermittently depressed during his childhood and from
Marcus’s viewpoint, often worried about her husband’s reactions more than
being attuned to her children.
During the first two years of analysis, Marcus found me unimaginative,
plodding and never offering much in his analysis. Though he was an academic
in an unrelated field to psychoanalysis, he was quite familiar with the structure
of analytic work and yet often began hours by expressing the wish that I more
actively structure his hours and initiate topics. At times, he felt little access to
his mind and was angry that I didn’t agree to his demands that I initiate topics
for us to discuss. He felt distress about not having access to his mind as well
but insisted that nothing was occurring to him. He would state in often nasty
tones that if I had some working formulation of his difficulties, then I should be
able to structure his hours. One part of Marcus felt this demand with
conviction and another knew that the point of our work was to see what came
up for him in his mind.
At other times, Marcus would construct topics for us to discuss and said that
he would be evaluating me in terms of what I might offer. I linked some of
these efforts of his to evaluate me with his father’s frequent allusions to how he
was performing in school and sports relative to his peers in grade school and
later in high school. I noted with Marcus that this constituted one of his best
efforts at playful transformation in relationship to his considerable pain about
being evaluated. Marcus seemed to be projecting on to me some of his degra-

ded, self-critical feelings and shame, in turn taking on the position of his eva-
luative father within these scenarios. But he was also only half-hearted about
these constructed scenarios and had a part of himself that was trying to trans-
form this dreaded exercise into something absurd.
I also understood Marcus’s demands as a way of seeking a responsive father,
a father actually interested in talking, in contrast to a father who rarely spoke
to him. There were also several sadomasochistic components involved. He
wished to humiliate me and degrade me in order to rid his own sense of low
self-worth and shame about showing up for analysis every day. Even this
attacking part of himself, though, was something that he was ashamed about,
something that was the subject of Fairbairn’s (1952) contribution to analytic
work. Analysis and I mattered to him, and he hated that we mattered to him.
Through his constant devaluation of me, I often spoke of his being freed up to
express his anger toward his father, a man who was not only unavailable and
distant, but who was at times actively critical. Marcus’s father was interested in
ideas and his own social relationships with male business partners. Marcus felt
that his father’s entrepreneurial life and his junior male associates offered him
“good, effective sons interested in commerce and sports,” in contrast to Marcus,
who was interested more in ideas.
Marcus’s father paid a great deal of attention, though, to his younger sister
and seemed to admire her in ways that made Marcus feel rejected and envious.
Marcus was not good enough to rate in his father’s system of valuation. I also
tried to let him know that I thought he was making me feel some of the ways
that he felt devalued in wanting his father to want to speak to him—that in not
saying what came to mind, as he was invited to do in analysis, he was enacting
the role of his silent and strangely unavailable father. But I worried that Mar-
cus’s inability to associate (parts shame, refusal and rejection of the idea) was
institutionalized as a part of his character in which he had to concretely reverse
the familial order in the analytic situation. I was quite uncertain about whether
this analysis would have enough success for Marcus to feel a difference in his
experience of self and others.
There were many fronts on which this belittlement of me occurred. He was
often contemptuous of my saying hello to him in the waiting room. He had
disdain for my walking him to the door at the end of our hours. He disliked
that I handed him a statement at the end of each month rather than send it
through the mail. I have had patients for whom something good between us is
threatening and even a few patients who are anxious and uncomfortable with
my smile when I greet them. But in each of these instances, I could experience a
part of the patient that knew that this made them uncomfortable. For Marcus,
it was grim business, and there was little sense that he conveyed that he was
aware of how threatened he was about something positive occurring between us.
Marcus sometimes spoke about my other patients as akin to his father’s group
of admiring, younger male colleagues, “sycophants,” who reinforced his father’s
ego. He agreed with me that he felt that I was in some way making him feel like
he would be submitting to me by feeling positively toward me or appreciating
that we were working hard together in analysis.
I know how little information is provided here about Marcus and our work
together, but I want to emphasize something about the analyst’s relationship to
the psychoanalytic process: I could never have sustained Marcus’s relentless
attack on me 30 years ago when I began doing analytic work. It is not that I
was especially weak or brittle in the face of negative transference, but it would
have been more devastating for me then than now if things hadn’t worked out
in Marcus’s treatment. The important factors that I believe allowed Marcus
and I to sustain our work together involved my relationship to analytic failure
and success. In Marcus’s treatment, I genuinely didn’t know whether he was
going to be able to make progress. I cared about Marcus, admired and was
quite fond of him. But I knew that it might not work out, and I was not very
confident of the outcome. I felt confident about trying, about analysis being the
best hope for treatment that might help Marcus to be able to transform some of
his tremendous rage and humiliation into sadness and grief.
In the third year of treatment, Marcus began talking to me much more about
intimate details of his life. He began telling me about how he was becoming less
disappointed by his wife, and reluctantly he conveyed that his wife was feeling
better about their relationship. Marcus began starting to tear up regularly in
relationship to various topics in a way that was quite new. His wife, who was
in her late 30s, was feeling as though she wanted to have another child, and as
he began telling me about this, he became very tearful with happiness. His
gratitude was something unarticulated but obviously experienced and expres-
sed. At other times, Marcus became tearful when telling me that he was starting
to feel good about a paper that he was writing and about how much his students
had enjoyed a class that he was teaching. He couldn’t speak about it, but it was a
palpable sign of developing the capacity to grieve. Most obvious was his relative
ease in trying to speak to me without his demands for me to initiate topics.
I believe that Marcus could feel what Nacht (1962) referred to as my “inner
attitude” of uncertainty about the analytic process. I’m not arguing that this is
what allowed treatment to get off the ground but I think that it may have
helped. Marcus didn’t want me to relate to him for my own needs—at some
level, of course, a fantasy that any of us can have patients or children who are
not in some way or other narcissistic appendages or extensions. To the extent
that his own success would be incorporated or engulfed by a sense of being a

narcissistic appendage to his father, Marcus was trapped into needing his ana-
lysis to fail (see Winnicott, 1971). It was only with time that he could sense that
he was allowed to fail and that I was allowed to fail; hence he felt a greater
sense of freedom to actually have an analysis.
I believe that when I began working as an analyst, the success of analysis was
too important for my own affirmation as opposed to my ideals of wanting to be
useful. In that sense, my relationship to the field of analysis was more as a child
wanting to be affirmed by the parent—the analytic process. As analysts, we

don’t ever completely leave this more infantile/narcissistic relationship to the
field of psychoanalysis, but we do find ways to become more aware of this
element of our relationship to the analytic process.
Conclusion
In these two brief clinical examples, I have tried to illustrate something about
how our relationship to the theories of psychoanalysis and the stage of our
analytic career are all important frames for psychoanalytic work.
One of the most important elements of our complex relationship to the ana-
lytic process is that we all have conflicts about it. A great deal of recent writing
in psychoanalysis from a broad range of theoretical perspectives is trying to get at
the fact that it’s very difficult to be an analyst, and we unconsciously struggle with
this process in ways that we have to come to terms with in the course of analytic
work, despite our enjoyment and commitment to our patients and the process.
Nacht (1962) referred to the analyst’s inner attitude. Who we are as persons
is an important part of the therapeutic action in analytic work. In a sense, I
suppose what I am trying to say is that our inner attitude as analysts is derived
not just from who we are as a person, but also our relationship to psycho-
analysis. This inverts the familiar observation that patients feel us as a person:
Patients do feel us as persons, but they also feel our person in our professional
work relationship to psychoanalysis. This means that they feel how we are
postured as analysts and as people. They feel how involved, committed and
ambivalent we are in our work. They feel, without knowing the particulars, how
known or mysterious to ourselves we are as analysts. For example, patients come
to experience how comfortable we are about our transparency, our privacy, or
our opacity, the kind of opacity that makes analysis possible. Are we comfortable
with the ways that are not available to patients in terms of being known or opaque?
In my view, the critique of the blank screen concept has gone too far in some corners,
minimizing how elements of our opacity helps analysis to get going. Believing in
reaching for mystery is not the same as cultivating mystification.
So there is no dichotomous relationship between who we are as persons and
who we are as analysts. We are postured, in part, as persons and as analysts.
Patients never know many things about our private selves, just as actually we
don’t know many things about our own private selves and our patient’s private
selves. For example, I think that it’s important that we as analysts are always
trying to understand our relationship to psychoanalysis, another area that
patients don’t have access to except through our unconscious communication
about these matters. Of course, I believe that our capacities to be as healthy and
available as analysts and people to our patients are crucial to this work. But
I think that the depressive position, as a person and as an analyst, is a
journey, not a destination. The term authenticity as part of the psychoanalytic
vocabulary rarely stands on its own as meaning something apart from the
analyst’s conscious experience of his own good intentions. Patients evaluate

the meanings, complex and often multidimensional regarding our partici-
pation. In my view, to be an analyst means in part that we are always trying
to find out about something from the patient about what those types of
experiences might mean.
One of the things that many analysts are trying to come to terms with about
our relationship to the analytic process is that psychoanalysis has gone through
a massive sea change regarding how we think about the notion of success and
limitation in psychoanalysis. Bromberg (2011) has aptly termed psychoanalysts
“artists of uncertainty.” In many ways, we are accepting that working with our
emotional reactions to our patients and the analytic process runs concurrently
with trying to know and help our patients. Put still another way, I emphasize
the verb trying as embedded in Beckett’s (1984, p. 11) phrase, “Ever tried. Ever
failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” Patients learn how to better
try to make sense of their experience, to try to bear pain and disappointment,
and to try to enjoy themselves as much as possible within the frequent reminders
of life’s pathos, the slender sadness.
While we don’t have a theorized version of therapeutic action related to the
patient and analyst trying, I venture to guess that most analysts believe that
their patient’s experience of trying to understand themselves and the analyst is a
key component of therapeutic action (see Chapter 7 for a clinical discussion of
this matter of trying and therapeutic action). As much as anything else, the
analyst’s experience of the analytic process as a canvass for trying is what
allows for affective and ideational play.
The analytic experience is a new and different one with each patient, because
not only is the analyst reacting to the complexity of each new patient, he is also
simultaneously experiencing his own idiosyncratic reactions to that patient at
that stage of his analytic career (Skolnikoff, 1996). We are always trying to
work with and accept our unconscious reactions to our patients and to the field
of psychoanalysis.
References
Bromberg, P. M. (2011). The Shadow of the Tsunami and the Growth of the Relational
Mind. New York, NY: Routledge.
Chused, J. F., & Raphling, D. L. (1992). The analyst’s mistakes. Journal of the Amer-
American Psychoanalytic Association, 41: 95–126.
Cooper, S. (1997). Interpretation and the psychic future. International Journal of Psy-
choanalysis, 78: 667–681.
Cooper, S. H. (2010a). An elusive aspect of the analyst’s relationship to transference.
Cooper, S. (2010b). Self-criticism and unconscious grandiosity: Transference- counter-
transference dimension. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 91: 1115–1136.

Freud, S. (1909). Letter to Jung, Letter 134F. In W. McGuire (Ed.), The Freud-Jung let-
ters: The Correspondence between Sigmund Freud and C. G. Jung (pp209–211).
Friedman, L. (2007).The delicate balance of work and illusion in psychoanalytic. Psy-
Harris, A. (2011). The relational tradition: Landscape and canon. Journal of the Amer-
Jones, E. (1954). Sigmund Freud: Life and work. Vol. 1: The Young Freud 1856–1900.
London: Hogarth.
Mitchell, S. A. (1988). Relational Concepts in Psychoanalysis: An Integration. Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Motherwell, R. (2007). The Writings of Robert Motherwell. Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press.
Nacht, S. (1962). The curative factors in psychoanalysis. International Journal of Psy-
choanalysis, 43: 206–211.
Reich, A. (1951). On countertransference. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 32:
25–31.
Schafer, R. (2003) Bad Feelings. New York, NY: Other Press.
Searles, H. (1979). Countertransference and Related Subjects. Madison, CT: Interna-
tional Universities Press.
Skolnikoff, A. Z. (1996). Paradox and ambiguity in the reactions of psychoanalysts at
work. Psychoanalytic Inquiry, 16: 340–361.
Smith, H. (2003). Conceptions of conflict in psychoanalytic theory and practice. Psycho-
analytic Quarterly, 72: 49–96.
Smith, H. (2004). The analyst’s fantasy of the ideal patient. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 73,
627–658.
Chapter 6
The things we carry: Finding/

creating the object and the
analyst’s self-reflective
participation
Perhaps home is less a specific place than an irrevocable condition.

James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room (1956)
In this chapter, I provide some ways in which I think about internal objects in
the interpersonal context of analytic work. In part of the chapter I offer an
appreciative critique of some elements of relational theory. I will argue that
relational theory began as an integration of elements of object relations theory
and interpersonal theory but over time has reached into a much broader cate-
gory of clinical thinking that includes a number of other clinical theories. I no
longer think of relational theory as a clinical theory but instead as an over-
arching way of thinking about psychoanalytic engagement. While metatheory
offers a broad type of inclusiveness for many different types of analysts, I find it
increasingly non-specific as a clinical theory. I try to distinguish between meta-
theory and clinical theories in general. My primary goal in this chapter is to
elaborate how I aim toward a dedicated attention to the patient’s internal
objects while thinking about my conscious and unconscious engagement with
those internal objects during the analytic process.
We never entirely leave home. Psychoanalysis allows us to eke out the free-
dom derived from the awareness of this fact and to avail ourselves of the
opportunity for new experience. I like to think about psychoanalysis as in line
with what Money-Kyrle (1968) referred to as a “psychic base” or Spezzano
(2007) termed a “home” for the minds of the patient and analyst, including a
home for the patient’s mind in the mind of the analyst. It is in that home that
patient and analyst strive in a process to make sense of what the patient con-
veys about himself that he doesn’t know he is conveying and how their inter-
action is informed by these communications.
What has been on offer from contemporary psychoanalytic theory, in general,
and from relational and interpersonal theory, in particular, is that we can never
be entirely satisfied with sharply differentiated determinations about the extent
to which our patient is elaborating his relationships to unconscious internalized
objects or elaborating more conscious perceptions and experiences of the other
within the interpersonal setting of analysis. I liken the ambiguity about what is
98 The things we carry
inside and what is outside to the interfused and permeable boundaries in the
magnificent oil paintings of Richard Diebenkorn. Elements of subjectivity
emerge and are not easily placed as belonging clearly to one container or
another. As Ferenczi (1909) put it, pain is not a point in time and space. We are
always trying to somehow help the patient establish: “Where does this belong
and come from? What do I do with it?” Indeed, it might be said that psycho-
analysts are a kind of boundary artist. For those analysts who make very active
use of object relations theory as well as the analyst’s personal participation in
their developed theories of therapeutic action, the ambiguity about interiority

versus what is outside is lived with rather than “resolved.”
In this chapter, I want to reflect about and emphasize the interaction between
an interest in the analyst’s dedicated attention to the patient’s internal object
relations, his “irrevocable condition,” and the analyst’s self-reflective participa-
tion. Our stops and starts of attention to the patient’s internal objects and our
own is in some sense one of the most important elements of our personal
participation.
As I will elaborate, relational theory has generated interest from analysts
with theoretical relationships/allegiances to interpersonal, self-psychological,
object relations, and Freudian psychologies. It’s my impression that in recent
years, branches of relational theory that emphasize the importance of inter-
nalized object relations as a construct have been less theorized than those
emphasizing interpersonal theory, self-psychology, and attachment theory.
I suggest that a dedicated attention to internal object relations is part of the
analyst’s attention to the reciprocally influencing relationship between object
relations and interpersonal phenomena. I think of object relations theory as
fundamentally a theory of unconscious internal object relations in dynamic
interplay with current interpersonal experience. This definition is consistent
with Ogden’s (2012) recent definition of object relations theory as “a group of
psychoanalytic theories holding in common a loosely knit set of metaphors that
address the intrapsychic and interpersonal effects of relationships among
unconscious internal objects, that is, among unconscious split-off parts of the
personality” (pp11–12).
I will also suggest that the patient’s and analyst’s need for privacy—and,
more importantly, the illusion of privacy in the presence of the other, hallmarks
of Kleinian, Independent and Bionian object relations theories—has always
been somewhat under-theorized within relational theory (Cooper, 2008). If I am
correct in this assessment, it is likely related to an emphasis within relational
theory on the patient’s read on the analyst and their mutual influence on each
other. However, I don’t believe that there needs to be a dichotomy between the
analyst’s needs for the illusion of privacy to think and dream and Mitchell’s
essential contribution to the notion that there’s no place to hide in analytic
process.
The analyst’s need for the illusion of privacy is part of what allows him to
work in slower tempos, to use reverie, clinical imagination and our self-
The things we carry 99
reflection about our participation to make connections to the ways that our
patients’ inner lives are peopled.
The analyst’s dedicated attention to internal objects and his self-

reflective participation as clinical ideals
Psychoanalysts who consider themselves as holding a relational sensibility are
extraordinarily theoretically diverse in their influences (Harris, 2011). I am very
much in agreement with Tublin (2011), who in a broad-ranging, cogent critical

appreciation of relational theory emphasized the importance of each analyst to
be explicit about their theories of mind and therapeutic action—or as Ghent
(1990) put it, to lay out their credo.
I have never thought of relational theory as either a theory of technique or,
obviously, a psychoanalytic metapsychology such as Freudian theory, ego psy-
chology, self-psychology, Kleinian or Bionian theory. There is an important,
implicit but not necessarily articulated debate within relational theory about
whether it is a clinical theory versus a kind of psychoanalytic metatheory (Bass
& Cooper, 2012; Cooper, 2010; Tublin, 2011). Traditional psychoanalytic the-
ories suggest particular methods or guidelines for working with and under-
standing the patient in analysis. As a metatheory, however, relational theory
would essentially stand outside the matrix of theories of psychoanalysis that
offer a metapsychology or a specific body of technique. As a metatheory, a
relational perspective suggests an overarching set of principles that guide clin-
ical thinking and clinical sensibility and might accompany analysts from a
variety of schools to approach patients in understanding the analytic process.
I think of relational theory as an overarching clinical model, a metatheory at
a different level of theoretical discourse than theories such as self-psychology or
ego psychology, a theory productively used by many different kinds of analysts.
How else might we understand the enormous differences in technical choices that
we see among analysts who describe their work as informed by relational theory?
I would suggest that the guiding clinical precept at the heart of a relational
sensibility lies in Mitchell’s emphasis on the importance of the analyst’s dedi-
cated interest in his self-reflective participation at the heart of analytic process.
Some of the other overarching principles related to relational theory involve the
analyst’s awareness of tensions between discipline and spontaneity, the analyst’s
participation as an old and new object, and our sliding and moving awareness
of mutual impact and participation. Many of the other overarching principles
of relational theory were well summarized by Harris (2011) in a far-ranging
essay that included various points of clinical focus and epistemology within a
relational perspective. In my view, implicit in many of these ideals is the aim of
helping patients to experience and see new modes of expressiveness as they
escape (often for nanoseconds in protean expressions) from the bondage of
internalized objects, along with the analyst’s self-reflective participation in
aiding and obstructing this process.
It is difficult for me to understand the patient’s forward movement, his

efforts at growth as well as his attempts to stay the same, without keeping in
mind some concept of the internal objects that keep the patient company and
provide him with self-continuity and stability. Internal object relations are akin
to private poems that have been mysteriously written and are in the process of
being expressed in the public arena of dyadic communication within the psy-
choanalytic process. Here, an appreciation of the ubiquity of repetition is at
play, background to whatever forward movement is being expressed through a
patient’s and analyst’s experiences in the analytic process (Bromberg, 1998;

Loewald, 1960). I have to know who is attacking the patient, the “internal
saboteur” (Fairbairn, 1952), in order to engage creatively in understanding what
is being communicated through the system of saboteurs. I am aiming to listen as
Claude Lanzmann, the film director of Shoah (1985), described when he termed
his film “a fiction of the real.” Lanzmann said that he “was imagining himself
as much into the minds and the souls of the killers as of the victims.” Each
analysis is a fiction of the real that our patients are narrating through what they
remember and the coverings of what they remember.
I view internalized object relations as always associated with particular
affective states that move in and out of our awareness. I find helpful the Boston
Change Process Study Group’s (BCPSG’s) way of thinking about introjects as
implicitly encoded emotional memories that are not easily available to verbali-
zation, which are expressed or known when enacted in a relational context that
prompts their retrieval. Seen from this perspective, the relationship between
analyst and patient consists of the interaction and intersection of the patient’s
and analyst’s internalized object relations.
I believe that relationally oriented analysts are so attuned to the here and
now elements of reciprocal influence that perhaps we think too dichotomously
of old experience, the things that we carry, as an avoidance of here and now
interaction. I view internal objects as “dynamically unconscious suborganizations
of the ego capable of generating meaning and experience, i.e. capable of thought,
feeling, and perception” (Ogden, 1993, p227). Internal object relationships involve
an interaction between two parts or subdivisions of the personality. At any
moment, one part of the personality represented by an internal object may
influence or activate experience and fantasy more than another.
Framing the past elements of internalized object relations involves the
patient’s dialogue with past relationships in the present for particular reasons
but does not mean that we as analysts are not involved in the “creation” of the
object as well (Bromberg, 1998, p. 213). Bromberg puts it beautifully when he
describes objects not as static structures but as components of a dynamic structure.
He notes that even though the patient’s need to perceive elements of the other is
strongly motivated, it doesn’t mean that the analyst doesn’t have a role in creating
the object. I agree with Bromberg that to understand another person’s interiority
requires that we understand our own in their presence. This makes the under-
standing of another person’s internal objects a fundamentally relational activity.
I have had the sense that relational theory’s focus on mutual influence (Aron,
1996) and mutual containment (Cooper, 2000b) has sometimes led to an unne-
cessary kind of theoretical incompatibility with formulations about how we are
recruited to fight with these internal saboteurs (Fairbairn, 1952) and internalized
objects (Sandler, 1976). I see no need to consider mutual influence between
patient and analyst and the patient’s recruitment into internalized scenarios as
dichotomous and incompatible dimensions within the analytic situation. It is true
that formulations about recruitment can easily be used to absolve the analyst of
his participation, but it doesn’t mean that the patient isn’t unconsciously doing
this at times. I find indispensable the contemporary Kleinian concept elaborated
by Feldman (1997) that the patient is often projecting internalized objects onto
the analyst and at some level psychically working to make the analytic situation
congruent (familiar) with the patient’s internalized world. Greenberg (1995) has
also made this point by emphasizing that in each “interactive matrix,” we are
often more likely to observe places where there is an incongruity between the
patient’s way of seeing and our own. However, understanding this tendency is
only a part of engagement with patients and does not address the patient’s
conscious and unconscious experience of the impact of internal objects of both
patient and analyst on the patient. Indeed, the analyst’s personal participation
involves curiosity about our influence on the patient as well as observing
obstacles for the patient to see how he is expressing something that he is not
aware of. As Bass (personal communication) has pointed out, the importance of
mutuality is always at play in that the analyst is also often expressing things
that he doesn’t know that he is expressing.
Experiences of those we carry are always being communicated in dialogue
with the other for multiple reasons that are rarely best understood strictly in
relation to recruiting us to participate with these internal experiences in pre-
scribed roles. Ricoeur’s question about why we are being told a past story in
the present begs many other questions that relate to what is happening between
the patient and analyst that threatens old attachments. Another way to put this
is that the communication of internal object relations is not always commu-
nicative of simply “old object” experience but is often conveyed in the new
experience of the analytic situation. Just as we are often invited to participate
on the old object continuum, it is easy to minimize the ways in which patients
are unconsciously expressing internal objects in the present and, by so doing,
testing the waters about whether something new can be integrated (or often
enacted) with the analyst. Patients seek an “exit from unending, futile wander-
ings in their own internal object world” (Ogden, 2004, p193). In the best of
circumstances, a dialectical tension is held by patient and analyst that includes
the more concrete and literal experience of old internalized object relations and
the here and now of the analytic situation in which the patient may be probing
new modes of experience and integration.
Psychoanalysis is fundamentally dialogic in nature, and the telling of what is
inside us, some of which we are aware of as patients and some not, is always
changing in dialogue with another. The meaning is always changing within us

as well, as we reveal the coverings of what we remember and focus on (Fer-
enczi, 1909). Psychoanalysis aims to change the meaning of our internalized
voices and relations as these coverings are explored.
Thus a dedication to understanding the patient’s internal objects often
works in a complementary way with an appreciation of clinical ideals asso-
ciated with relational theory. The relationship between the analyst’s personal
participation and internalized objects has been repeatedly advanced, particu-
larly in the writing of Bass (2009), Bromberg (1998, 2011), Davies (2004),
Stern (2010), and I hope in some of my own work. In the tradition of some of
this writing, the analyst’s personal participation has been framed in an
attempt to understand elements of those inside the patient and analyst with
whom we are conversing. In the language of self-states that has dominated
recent writing from relational theorists, it is easy to overlook that self-states
arise in relation to internalized experiences with important others who live
inside us.
Dedication to understanding the pervasive influence of the patient’s internal
objects does not imply that there is value in unearthing these object relations as
reified structures, nor is it synonymous with believing that all that occurs in
analytic work is exclusively determined by the patient’s internal world. The
analyst’s use of the construct of internalized object relations that we are
unconsciously communicating to others about does not mean that all meaning
is preformed but instead emerges in the dialogic context of psychoanalysis (e.g.,
Bass, 2001).
The elaboration of the pervasive influence of internal object relations is best
accomplished through appreciating a tension between the often concrete ways
in which these internal experiences are held by the patient and a figurative
relationship to internal objects that we are trying to show the patient. Our
way of speaking of internal objects is through the translation of private
experience, of the private condensed poems that our patients are expressing.
We do so with a kind of “as if” quality through the use of metaphors that
exist in dynamic tension with respect for the patient’s literal meaning, what
Bion would call its concrete and material meaning for the patient. Metaphors
are our border language at the psychically imagined markers of what is inside
and outside.
Analyst and patient differ in their relationships to each other’s internal
world. The analyst is dedicated to understanding the patient’s internal objects
as well as to reflecting on his own participation with his patient. The patient
does not truck in dedicated understanding of the analyst’s internal objects, even
though he is influenced by them and often curious about them; the analyst
cannot help but convey his internal object world because it is intrinsic to human
communication. The patient is, however, motivated by his curiosity, his wish to
make attachments, his fears, his wish to be gratified, his wish to be understood,
and to express many sexual and aggressive feelings. The patient gets to know
much about our internalized objects (often without naming them), and the
patient is forced or enabled to work with them as imaginatively as possible (e.g.,
Davies, 2004). In fact, unfortunately, some of our patients’ “shells” (Bromberg,
1991), described well by Winnicott’s (1969) false self, Balint’s (1968) basic fault
and Modell’s (1963) cocoon, allow them to be gifted at working with the
analyst’s internal objects at the expense of their own capacities for enlivening
and imaginative relatedness.
In my own experience as both analyst and patient, treatments worth their
weight involve the analyst becoming deeply familiar with parts of the patient
that are rigidly influential, troubling and refractory to insight. These parts of
the patient become animated in treatment as a collection of characters with
whom we regularly visit and communicate. Some of these features in response
to internalized object relations are almost like atavistic features from the per-
spective of the analyst but feel like vital elements of self for the patient. The
analyst’s participation is always framed in the shadow of these forces, including
our most improvisational and creative activities as analysts. In a sense, I think
of what we do by coming to understand the patient’s internalized world and his
adaptation as a kind of animating the atavistic. We try to bring it into the
world now and know it with the patient in contrast to its anachronistic origins
in which it was the best the patient had at that time. We come to know it
because fundamentally analytic work lies, in a paradoxical way, partly in the
analyst’s internal life.
In the following brief clinical example, I try to provide some broad contours
about how I got to know elements of my patient Rachael’s adaptation through
some of my own associative processes, reverie and the quality of my own rela-
tionships to the patient’s internal objects. Rachael’s communications during this
early phase of analysis were highly repetitive and sparse, focusing on ruminative
and self-hating descriptions of herself. I present here more about my internal
responses to this very constricted and quiet period for my patient that set the
stage for what eventually became a much more enlivened and verbally driven
analysis in which the patient could create metaphors for her inner life (see also
Cooper, 2012). The period that I present is one in which I felt that I worked
perhaps too much with what I experienced as concretely “inside” Rachael that
exerted psychic control and not enough about her experience and enactments
that we co-created together. I have chosen a vignette that I think is quite use-
fully criticized in this regard. But I want to suggest that as analysts we each as
individuals have to come to a sense of knowing the patient’s internal world
from the patient’s and our own subjective experiences. We do so in order to
find a psychic reality that is not solely defined by either the patient’s experience
or our own experience about what the patient is communicating that the
patient might not know that she is communicating. In a sense, the work
that I describe allowed her analysis to begin and deepen by leaving the realm of
our concretely constructed object relations into a different kind of meaning
system.
Animating the atavistic: A clinical illustration

Rachael, a divorced woman in her late 50s, has once again taken back her quite
sadistic boyfriend, Josh, after he was extremely verbally abusive. Rachael and I
have come to believe that her relationship with Josh in many ways repeats her
masochistic relationship with her mother, Sarah. Rachael’s mother envied her
for having a childhood and a life. Rachael feels destructive in relationship to
Sarah every time she enjoys herself. Each time that Josh breaks up with Rachael
for a few weeks, she is not only devastated by the loss, but is subsumed by
feelings of worthlessness and stultification. She doesn’t want to leave her
home—her actual place of residence and her internal home in which she feels
that she is a disgusting and unlovable person. Even her grown son, whom she
adores and he her, doesn’t cheer her up when he visits or calls in this context.
In these states, she was even more quiet than usual. Rachael’s sessions were
often spent in sparsely verbalized, elaborated forms of self-loathing. Her words
were often directed toward how she didn’t want to accept suggestions from
friends and her son about doing things, cultivating her abilities and dating
again. In a sense, I experienced these words as instructions to not mess with her
internal attachments.
I would sometimes experience her words as actions involving burying herself
alive, and I would silently feel anxious about witnessing and, in a sense, being
party to her psychic death. I felt that I was rendered helpless to Rachael’s use of
her words as verbal assault weapons. At other times, I experienced her words
as verbal shovels that would dig her grave deeper and that were “facilitators” to
her psychic burial. I talked to Rachael at times about her use of words in this
way, and her response was often one of very sad agreement, as though she had
been given a psychic death sentence and we were helpless to do anything
about it.
I think that I understand why she enters into these states and why she stays
attached to Josh. She longs to be accepted and loved, but her primary attachment
is to a rejecting and condemning (m)other. I understand why her loyalty to her
mother and her boyfriend trump all else—because her mother was all that she
had as a little girl when her father was taken as a political prisoner and mur-
dered. I understand how frightened she is to take a step that incurs her mother’s
verbal attack toward her—even though her mother has been actually dead for
ten years. I want to say to Rachael, and I mean very emphatically say, “Please,
please, stop destroying yourself.” Sometimes I have, and when I don’t, she
knows that it is always there in the way I am thinking about and listening to
her. But these attempts always seemed futile, and she seemed to have little
interest in anything that she might think, feel or say. The act of talking itself
seemed to enact the punishment that her mother would inflict on her as a little
girl through her criticisms of her schoolwork and creative art projects.
I had a few different relationships to Rachael’s most problematic affective
states/object relations. I see the analyst’s work as aimed at as much integration
of his awareness about these relationships to the patient’s affective states as

possible. I say that these are particularly problematic states for Rachael because
she seems to want to change them and yet they are quite refractory to change. I
often feel that I understand her essentially fierce loyalty to serve her internalized
mother, a loyalty that itself seems to me like a weapon that she turns against
herself. This is a kind of agent that serves a fierce master, what Fairbairn called
the internal saboteur. I am very fond of Rachael, and when I feel a frequent
countertransference hostility toward her mother, I usually know that this is
kind of a naive and simplistic stance and that in fact it is one that is somewhat
insensitive, we might say, to the part of Rachael that must obey and submit to
her mother as well as the part of Rachael that enacts behaviors that are like
how her mother behaved with her. Nevertheless, in my reverie, I sometimes
view Sarah as a child killer, and in my private construction, I am angry about
how much she envied Rachael for having a life.
I began to think about Rachael’s period of debilitation, passivity and pre-
occupation with Josh as expressive of a passive wish that she wanted me to do
all of the fighting with the killers in high places. I conveyed to her that, in a
sense, without feeling empowered to do so, she felt guilty about her analysis
becoming a court in which her mother’s crimes were displayed, heard and
adjudicated. However, Rachael continued to tell me how much, in fact, she
deserved her punishment and that Josh had rejected her on this basis.
I became more aware that in feeling such unmitigated hostility toward Sarah,
I am resisting Rachael’s experience of her mother as an internal object, an
object far more complexly held by her than I am able to embrace at these times.
Like Rachael, in a sense Sarah dominates me too in that I feel that she has
defeated me over and over again. These thoughts also in some ways ignore how
Sarah is a part of Rachael. Sometimes, I have imagined her laughing in death at
my pathetic attempts at interpretation or trying to convince Rachael of her own
self-worth. Rachael and I are tiny serfs in the face of Sarah’s domination and
destructiveness. Yet I am also aware of being deeply competitive with Sarah
and wish that she wasn’t cheating by having started the race for Rachael’s
psychic health and attention more than 40 years before I met Rachael.
Over time through this period of relative silence on Rachael’s part, I am also
becoming increasingly aware of what feels like a perverse admiration of
Rachael and her adaptation, particularly her steadfast loyalty to her mother,
even though I know that this involves a great deal of submission on her part. I
sometimes realized that I even admire/envy Sarah’s power to influence Rachael
in comparison to my sense of futility. But I am always going back and forth
internally between an appreciation of the way in which Rachael holds Sarah
with conscious and unconscious anger and deep attachment, on the one hand,
and as seeing Sarah as a kind of monolithically held bad object, on the other. In
this dense set of feelings of admiration and attraction to Rachael and anger and
competitiveness with Sarah, I have sometimes found a place to try to speak
with Rachael in her analysis. She has asked, “Do you ever feel like giving up on
me?” I say, “I think that sometimes you want to know whether I’ll be as
steadfast in my hopes for your growth as you feel that your mother has been in
your staying stuck. Sometimes I think that you are giving up before I could give
up on you. Being destroyed by Josh’s breakup and not leaving your house feels
like it’s more about being Sarah’s little girl than about Josh.”
She says, “I have Josh on my mind, and you have Sarah on your mind.” I say,
“It’s true, but I think that parts of your mother’s attitudes toward you are on
your mind sometimes in ways that you don’t realize. You are aware and not
aware of her impact on you. That’s why you can’t go out. You are devastated
by his rejection, but in so many ways you’re able to see Josh for who he is, a
guy who we both know has treated you terribly. But Sarah always instructs:
‘Choose he who fulfills my need for you to not have your life and to feel
degraded and to not feel how bright and desirable you are as a person.’ I think
that this is the voice you are often hearing in your head.”
I think that you can see a rather familiar and not particularly imaginative
way in which I am trying to help Rachael to explore something about her
relationship with an internal object relationship that influences and motivates
her experiences with Josh and, at times of rejection, takes precedence over
everything else in her life. In many ways, I believed that it was the most useful
thing that I could provide during these periods of massive retreat. There were
plenty of other times when I would simply and more directly express feelings
that Rachael is a loveable person; that she is destroying herself; that her self-
loathing punishes her and others who care about her. In this mode, I partially
differentiate myself from her mind by showing her how I think in general and
how I think about Josh, a real person, not an occupier, a colonizing oppressor.
Yet I am also conveying for her in likely problematic ways how I am also
experiencing myself as under her mother’s grip. She would sometimes joke at
these times, in one of her rare, more playful verbalizations, that I am pre-
occupied with those who occupy her, and we have a bit of fun together about
whether it is she who is more preoccupied than she realizes when she is in
action about putting her life on hold. I am quite aware at these moments to try
to be as careful as possible to not reify these internal voices and objectify the
patient through an analyst/observer who sees and knows.
There is a fault line there in this dialogue, and I can easily fall into it or,
equally problematic, avoid coming up to its edges and try to work there at the
border of what is inside her that influences her experience. Yet I was also only
partially aware during this period that no matter how much I understood the
ways in which her mother was ambivalently held by Rachael, I am paying more
attention to the violent grasp that her internal maternal presence has on her. It
was only over time that I began to realize how much I was enacting with
Rachael the role of the absent and desperately needed paternal presence to
protect Rachael from her mother’s most toxic impact. This is also a place
where the analyst can sometimes be prone to locate all toxic effects in the toxic
object rather than see how much the patient is identified with such objects. This
is a fault line that I believe must be accounted for in all “passionate” (Hoffman,
2009) efforts on the part of the analyst to help patients with their toxic objects.
Indeed, this is often a prerequisite for negotiations with the most toxic internal
objects, who are sometimes experienced as “killers in high places” (Cohen,
1992).
For Rachael, Green’s (1993) concept of “the dead mother” was always pre-
sent. Rachael grew up in relation to a mother who was struggling with what I
imagined was her own sense of bereavement—a loss that I could not fully take
in and bear myself. I imagined her more as a destructive object inside Rachael,
not as a person whose own losses left Rachael with cavernous holes in her own
psyche. I was unwittingly minimizing Rachael’s unconscious registration of very
early trauma (Coates, 2012) and experiences that could not be “remembered” in
narrative form (Faimberg, 1988; Harris, 2009). As Green (1993) illuminates,
patients with mothers who are so encumbered by loss are terrified of closeness
and thus require unconscious efforts to destroy good objects, further preventing
rage, depression or mourning. There is, simply, “no-thing.”
Despite the clumsiness and enacted elements of these kinds of interventions,
Rachael was eventually able to extricate herself from her actual relationship
with Josh. However, her relationship to the punishing and sadistic demands of
her mother was a much longer and more complex project. I want to convey a
few more moments of our analytic work and mostly my internal work to help
illustrate the analyst’s object relationships to the most anachronistic parts of what
the patient has developed to adapt. Mostly, I want to describe an intersubjective
process related to learning about the patient’s inner life that integrates two
psychic realities toward the creation of a third psychic reality.
One very important demonstration of our changing relationships to Rachael’s
internalized relationships with her mother occurred only a bit later in our work
after she had finally broken up with Josh. I began to notice a striking shift in
my countertransference feelings toward Sarah. This was a shift from a more
unmitigated anger in the countertransference toward Sarah to a more complex
and nuanced relationship to Rachael’s internalized bad objects. As I have noted,
Rachael’s self-loathing had inspired my own angry feelings toward Sarah as a
mother to Rachael. But in response to Rachael’s frequent forms of self-loathing,
I began to feel a new sense of guilt about my angry feelings toward her mother.
I began to think of Sarah more as a person than a kind of dehumanized force, a
bad, undifferentiated presence inside Rachael. As Rachael would talk about new
forms of masochistic behavior in relation to her work and men, some of my
thoughts and reverie turned toward her mother again. Her mother became more
of a “person,” a whole person (granted a person I’d never met, who had been
dead for ten years and I really only knew as one of Rachael’s introjects), than
had ever been the case. I knew that Rachael’s mother had suffered deeply and
was constantly ridding herself of a sense of vileness and hatred—her own sense
of having been murdered or nearly murdered—and that her envy toward
Rachael must have been too much to bear. I began to have visual images of
Rachael’s mother, both as an older woman and as a young grief-stricken

woman, in ways that I had never experienced before.
In response to this more guilt-ridden anger toward Sarah, I began to silently
wonder if it was more closely related to Rachael’s feelings toward her mother
as a mother who could not bear her anger, who could not bear anything but
Rachael’s submission. Rachael was terribly guilty about her anger toward Sarah
and guilty about her own existence as a separate person from Sarah, so much so
that it was even difficult for her to feel much vital anger toward her mother.
She was angry in a kind of abstract way, more akin to knowing it through
proxy, aware that her friends, her former spouse, her son and I all felt that she
had a right to feel angry. In my changed and more nuanced version of feeling a
different access to my compassion for the terribly traumatized Sarah, I believe
that there were a few things happening. I was identifying more with Rachael’s
experience rather than fighting with it to try to get her to feel what I wanted
her to feel. I also began to notice that in my mind and with Rachael, I was
referring to her more as Sarah and less as “your mother.” She was more human
to me, and just as important, she was becoming delinked from her maternal
position with Rachael. Sarah was becoming for me a person separate from
being Rachael’s mother and a more separate person from Rachael. Sarah was
becoming decolonized for me, as it were, from Rachael’s inner life. As her
mother became less of Rachael’s occupier in my own mind, in some ways,
Rachael and I became a bit less preoccupied with Sarah.
I believe that in line with Civitarese (2015) I was able to access an internal
subjective experience of reality, as the means whereby psychic reality is made
available within the analytic couple through unconscious to unconscious
contact, as opposed to material reality, or “sensible” reality.
I was now beginning to think more actively about Rachael’s statement to me
that I was preoccupied with her mother as quite astute—not just a deflection or
form of resistance to her painful subjugation with her mother. My empathic
connection to Rachael and the complexity of her internalized relationship to her
mother had earlier seemed subordinate to my own version of Sarah. I hadn’t
been absorbing the level of Rachael’s attachment to her mother, and, interest-
ingly, I had been taking a more unconsciously driven critical approach to her
attachment. My virtuous efforts to help her change and become more separated
from Sarah were unconsciously bloodied by enacting Sarah’s critical and direc-
tive stance. This constituted an enactment with Sarah as my own private
Sarah—with my own internal object. I resisted a kind of surrender described by
Ghent (1990) and Benjamin (2004) as well as by Ogden’s (1994a, 2004) sub-
jugating third.
At the same time, I was allowing myself to also feel more helplessness and
futility about ever changing the Sarah introject and that this seemed to be
allowing Rachael to make more progress. I realized that Rachael’s mother was
so emblazoned in her body and mind that talking wasn’t going to change that
experience. I had experienced a kind of radical splitting between the goodness
of Rachael and likely me and the badness of her mother. Without realizing it, I
had in some way enacted something about Rachael’s whole life and analysis
being about her mother. Of course, we have to focus with our patients on the
importance of their parents and the way in which they are internalized. But in
this analysis, my focus with Rachael had enacted something about Rachael’s
analysis being Sarah’s analysis; in a sense, her analysis had unwittingly been
“all about Sarah” instead of being “all about Rachael.” I also had moved from
a more unconsciously heroic fantasy of doing combat with Sarah to accepting
the considerably more modest progress that we make as psychoanalysts.

Rachael was afraid to take me in and to let her feel loveable to me and
excited about me. But I was beginning to understand more fully that for
Rachael to use me and to be excited about her own life and what we were
doing together, she felt as though it would be over Sarah’s dead body. My
engagement with her, the medium of my engagement, was expressed through a
kind of objectifying Sarah in her eyes. “This is who your mother really is,” as
opposed to “this is who your mother is to you.” Many of you would correctly
say to me, “Well of course. You are not listening to your patient. You are
imposing your view on her no matter how well-intentioned, and you are talking
to Rachael about her inner life.” And of course you would all be correct. But
my point is that we each have to arrive at a new relationship to the patient’s
most apparently destructive internal objects that are part of what is familiar to
the patient’s adaptation. This is where the heart of analytic work lies: in a
paradoxical way, partly in the analyst’s internal life. This is why the most
paradoxical part of the analyst’s personal participation in some ways lies in his
dedicated interest to the patient’s internal object world. I have a very personal
participation, a very personal relationship with the patient’s internal objects.
Along these lines, Ogden (1994b) also suggested that interpretation is a form
of object relationship, and each object relationship carries a sense of the ana-
lyst’s understanding of the latent content of the interaction with the object. I
am particularly drawn to this way of putting things because I believe it conveys
not only the ways in which we inevitably convey elements of our subjective
participation, but also how, when we are able, we convey what we have done
with our patient’s internalized experience through the filter of our own sub-
jective lenses about how we participate with our patients.
I don’t know which came first: Rachael’s ability to feel slightly less tyr-
annized by her mother, or my ability to better understand and accept how her
existence was inextricably linked to her mother’s control. Over time, it became
noticeable to me, palpably actually, that Rachael and I were more alone in my
office than we had ever been. It felt more intimate, and some erotic feelings
were opened up for the first time in our work. Sarah just wasn’t there in quite
the same way. We began to work on some quite different matters related to
excitement with others and most importantly with her mind. She could more
comfortably enter the home of her mind and how she experienced herself in
my mind.
Thinking fast and slow: The analyst’s needs for the illusion of
privacy and self-reflection
One paradoxical element of deeply valuing the analyst’s personal participation
as an essential element of understanding his patient is that it often takes some
privacy or the illusion of privacy for self-reflection about these matters. I use
the word privacy (Cooper, 2008) to refer to a place for the analyst’s self-reflec-
tive activity. The fact that it is a private place as conceived by the analyst does
not imply that the patient doesn’t read and experience us in a variety of ways.
Just as the patient’s private space is never entirely private in the analytic setting,
the analyst’s private space is also never entirely private. Instead, patient and
analyst share illusions about privacy. The analyst and patient’s privacy and
illusory privacy exist in their individual imaginations and is a shared part of the
psychical field. In a fascinating paper, Foehl (2011) suggests that psychological
distance is well understood as a phenomenon that is fundamental to the nature
of experience, a way of understanding how we are, at once, fundamentally
connected and private.
In my emphasis on privacy, it is easy to mistake the analyst’s varying needs
for privacy with either the blank screen concept or cultivating mystification.
The need for privacy is, in fact, a transparent statement on the part of the
analyst about what he needs in order to accomplish work. If anything, I would
argue that a claim for “authenticity” needs to include the area of the analyst’s
needs for privacy and that those who suggest that they don’t need such privacy
are in fact cultivating forms of idealization or mystification.
Illusions and the capacity to use illusion are essential to our well-being and
capacity to function in all regards as humans—as romantic partners, as parents,
as children and certainly as analysts. To some extent, what makes analysis
productive is the capacity of a patient and analyst to work with their illusions
about knowing and being known and about what is private and shared. The
privacy I want to draw attention to is the analyst’s need for self-reflection, not
for privacy sake, though our experienced needs for both personal privacy and
self-reflection also differ in relationship to each patient. As Friedman (2007) put
it, we are specialists of a sort with dangerous illusions.
The analyst’s illusion of privacy is something that he will hold in many dif-
ferent ways and with various feelings and conflicts associated with these needs,
and these needs obviously vary from analyst to analyst. He may be relatively
comfortable with these needs because he has found that he has been able to help
patients through the use of his mind in this space. He may feel guilty about
needing privacy or be avoidant or even somewhat dissembling about his need
for this space. Perhaps this particular place of reflection for each analyst (and
each analyst is also probably different with each patient) may also be usefully
regarded as another form of self-care (Harris, 2009) that the analyst requires.
Certainly all of these needs were the subject of focus for Slochower (1996) in
her exploration of various forms of holding, as they were for Modell’s (1976)
seminal contributions to the holding elements of interpretation and therapeutic

action.
Our privacy or need for privacy doesn’t contradict the basic understanding
that we are readable to our patients and that they are keen observers of us. Yet
it is easy to conflate our awareness that there’s no place to hide in analytic
work with the question of how much we as analysts value our place for self-
reflection and reverie just as we promote our patients’ efforts to tell us what
they feel and think. In a sense, our needs for privacy mark the humbling aware-
ness that we are all to some extent mysterious to ourselves, we dissemble, and we
need to try to understand it in various ways that we find useful—sometimes
within ourselves and sometimes aloud with our patients.
A “home” for the minds of the patient and analyst (Spezzano, 2007) involves
an assemblage of various characters comprised of the internal objects of the
patient and analyst. I try to maintain a dedicated attention to this assemblage of
characters, and in order to do so, the place for my own capacity for feeling and
thinking is indispensable.
I want the patient to be able to develop a sense and a home for self-reflection
about what they are saying that they do not already know that they are saying
and to understand that I need a space for the same. In fact, to this point, our
understanding of a particular enactment evolves over time in the privacy of the
analyst’s imagination (Cooper, 2008), while at other times, it occurs through
the analyst’s capacities to think aloud in less formulated ways about what they
might be saying together (e.g., Bass, 2001; Stern, 1983, 2010).
The seminal contributions of analysts over the last 30 years that have
emphasized the importance of the analyst’s personal participation have created
room for analysts to be open to spontaneity, improvisation, unformulated
experience, and thinking aloud with their patients. Yet within the development
of relationally influenced clinical theory, there has been less discussion of the
analyst’s need for privacy. When I wrote a paper several years ago about my
own use of reverie (Cooper, 2008) and the analyst’s needs for the illusion of
privacy to advance self-reflection about his participation, I was unable to find a
paper explicitly about the use of reverie within the relational literature. I sug-
gested that within the relational literature, it would be useful to provide more
explicit elaboration of the private analytic space for self-reflection and more
transparency about the analyst’s need for privacy. My use of my associative
processes overlaps a great deal with that of Ogden, except that I am likely to
share a bit more directly about what I thought about that leads me to the
understanding I am putting forward. I see a great deal of overlap also with
Stern (2010), who has repeatedly tried to address how he uses his associative
processes and how he communicates elements of these to his patients.
This relative absence in the relational literature is striking because self-reflection,
after all, was at the heart of Mitchell’s descriptions and characterizations of the
analytic process. He suggested that psychoanalysis itself is defined as a process
between two people in which the analyst’s engagement is guided by his own
capacity for self-reflection about the quality of engagement with the patient. He
stated (Mitchell, 1997, p193):
The intention that shapes my methodology is a self-reflective responsive-

ness of a particular (psychoanalytic) sort. In putting it this way, I am sug-
gesting that my way of working entails not a striving for a particular state
of mind, but an engagement in a process.
Here, Mitchell might be construed as saying that in not “striving” for a parti-
cular state of mind, he is eschewing the analyst’s seeking a place for reverie. In
my own experience, reverie happens. Our clinical imaginations are always in
motion, and when they are seemingly not, we are seeking ways to get our minds
to think about why they are not. So I agree with the idea of not striving for a
state of mind that allows reverie, but I am striving for a kind of openness to what
Ogden (2004) termed a “motley” collection of what I am thinking and feeling.
I would hasten to add that Mitchell’s (e.g., 1991) case vignettes are filled with
examples of internal work, hard work that he put toward understanding the
nuances of countertransference responsiveness in relation to what the patient
was conveying. He was constantly asking himself questions such as: why does
this sound like this now, while it sounded like something else earlier in the
process? For Mitchell, though, even more than for Racker (1952) and Searles
(1979) before him, self-reflection occurs in a kind of public discourse, either as
work with a patient or in analytic writing with us as readers; the privacy of his
clinical imagination is never conceptualized as entirely private, and a part of his
entire clinical and theoretical project was to redefine what is personal and pri-
vate. He wanted to insist, and I agree, that there is no such conceptual category
as an isolated intrapsychic structure of one person defined as entirely separate
from the sensibility of the person who is perceiving and receiving the patient. It
is important, however, to not conflate this seminal clinical insight at one level
of theoretical discourse about personal and private with an overly concrete and
thus degraded version of practice in which the analyst might dispense too much
with the articulated need for self-reflection about his work thinking about his
patient.
Reverie itself has always implied a relatively more quiet analytic space in
which the analyst is allowing himself periods of silence to reflect on what he is
hearing. I think that the concrete and degraded version of reverie is the con-
struction of a space in which the analyst sits for long periods of silence while
thinking about what he is hearing (Cooper, 2008). So while I see no need to
concretely equate reverie with long periods of silence, I view the opportunity to
think and feel as a precondition for some analytic work. I value the notion of
psychic reality as it emerges in the analytic field that was explored by Andre
Green (2005) and Ogden’s (1994a, 1994b) intersubjective analytic third; these
phenomena result from the exchange of the patient’s and analyst’s reverie, a
third subjectivity that is unconsciously generated by the analytic pair. It has
been my sense that some field theorists may tend to too easily presume a col-
lapse of the analytic third that results from the dyadic focus on interpersonal
exchanges more frequently described by relationally influenced analysts (e.g.,
Levine, 2013).
The analyst’s self-reflection is embedded in a framework that includes his
interest in the patient’s affective experience and internalized object relations. It
is easy to conceive of an interest in both internal objects and self-reflective
participation in narrow and concrete ways. All of us who are deeply interested
in internalized object relations need to keep in mind that we misrepresent reality

when we think that what is inside the patient determines what happens in the
analytic situation (Baranger, 1993).
For analysts who aim to be deeply attuned to their personal participation as
inevitable and crucial in understanding the unconscious mind of the patient, it
is possible to concretize the meaning of personal participation—in essence, a
form of resistance on the part of the analyst to understanding the patient’s
unconscious experience. In my view, a very large part of interpersonal engage-
ment with the patient—interaction, if you will—is with internal attachments to
objects that the patient holds and that constitute the formation of an analytic
intersubjective third, a view described with various terminology by a range of
analysts (Aron, 2006; Benjamin, 2004; Bromberg, 1998; Cooper, 2010; Ferro,
2005; Foehl, 2010; Ogden, 2004; Russell, 1973; Spezzano, 2007; Stern, 2010).
I think of the analyst’s self-reflection as a process of trying to be curious
about helping a patient in very unusual circumstances—those in which we aim
to learn with the patient something that he might not know in advance that he
is saying. So, too, our reflections issue from the understanding that patients come
to know parts of us that we are not always aware of feeling or expressing. It is in
this self-with-other and self-reflective space that we breathe in the psychoanalytic
process.
References
Aron, L. (1996). A Meeting of Minds: Mutuality in Psychoanalysis. Hillsdale, NJ:
Analytic Press.
Aron, L. (2006). Analytic impasse and the third: Clinical implications of intersubjectivity
theory. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 87: 349–368.
Baldwin, J. (1956). Giovanni’s Room. New York, NY: Doubleday.
Baranger, M. (1993). The mind of the analyst: From listening to interpretation.
Bass, A. (2001). It takes one to know one: Or, whose unconscious is it anyway?
Bass, A. (2009). An independent theory of clinical technique viewed through a relational
lens. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 19: 237–245.
Bass, A., & Cooper, S. (2012). Relational psychoanalysis. In E. Auschincloss & E. Samberg
(Eds.), Psychoanalytic Terms and Concepts. New York, NY: The American Psycho-
analytic Association.
Benjamin, J. (2004). Beyond doer and done to: An intersubjective view of thirdness.
Bromberg, P. M. (1991). On knowing one’s patient inside and out: The aesthetics of
unconscious communication. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 1: 399–422.
Bromberg, P. M. (1998). Standing in the Spaces: Essays on Clinical Process, Trauma, and
Dissociation. Hillsdale, NJ: Analytic Press.
Civaterese, G. (2015). Transformations in hallucinosis and the receptivity of the analyst.
International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 96: 1091–1116

Coates, S. (2012). The child as traumatic trigger: Commentary on paper by Laurel
Moldawsky Silbur. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 22: 123–128.
Cohen, L. (1992). Anthem. On The Future [CD]. New York, NY: Columbia Records.
Cooper, S. (2000a). Objects of Hope: Exploring Possibility and Limit in Psychoanalysis.
Hillsdale, NJ: Analytic Press.
Cooper, S. (2000b). Mutual containment in the psychoanalytic process. Psychoanalytic
Dialogues, 10: 166–189.
Cooper, S. (2008). Privacy, reverie, and the analyst’s ethical imagination. Psychoanalytic
Quarterly, 77: 1045–1073.
Cooper, S. (2010). A Disturbance in the Field: Essays in Transference-Counter-
Cooper, S. (2012). Exploring a patient’s shift from relative silence to verbal expressive-
ness: Observations on an element of the analyst’s participation. International Journal
Davies, J. (2004). Whose bad objects are we anyway?: Repetition and our elusive love
affair with evil. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 14: 711–732.
Faimberg, H. (1988). The telescoping of generations: Genealogy of certain identifications.
Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 24: 99–117.
Fairbairn, R. (1952). Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality. London, UK: Routledge.
Ferenczi, S. (1909). Introjection and transference. In Contributions to Psychoanalysis
(pp35–93). New York, NY: Basic Books.
Ferro, A. (2005). Seeds of Illness, Seeds of Recovery: The Genesis of Suffering and the
Role of Psychoanalysis. London: Routledge.
Foehl, J. C. (2010). The play’s the thing: The primacy of process and the persistence of
pluralism. Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 46: 48–86.
Foehl, J. C. (2011). A phenomenology of distance: On being hard to reach. Psycho-
analytic Dialogues, 21: 607–618.
Friedman, L. (2007). The delicate balance of work and illusion in psychoanalysis. Psy-
Ghent, E. (1990). Masochism, submission, surrender: Masochism as a perversion of
surrender. Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 26: 108–136.
Green, A. (1993). The Work of the Negative, trans. A. Weller, London: Free Association, 1999.
Green, A. (2005). Key Ideas for Contemporary Psychoanalysis: Misrecognition and
Recognition of the Unconscious. London: Brunner-Routledge.
Greenberg, J. (1995). Psychoanalytic technique and the interactive matrix. Psychoanalytic
Harris, A. (2009). “You must remember this…” Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 19: 2–21.
Harris, A. (2011). The relational tradition: Landscape and canon. Journal of the Amer-
Hoffman, I. Z. (2009). Therapeutic passion in the countertransference. Psychoanalytic
Dialogues, 19: 619–637.
Lanzmann, C. (Director). (1985). Shoah [Motion picture]. France: Historia.
Levine, H. (2013). Comparing field theories. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 23: 667–673.
Loewald, H. (1960). On the therapeutic action of psycho-analysis. International Journal
of Psychoanalysis, 41:16–33.
Mitchell, S. A. (1991). Needs, wishes and interpersonal negotiation. Psychoanalytic

Inquiry, 11: 147–170.
Mitchell, S. A. (1997). Influence and Autonomy in Psychoanalysis. Hillsdale, NJ:
Analytic Press.
Modell, A. H. (1963). Primitive object relationships and the predisposition to
schizophrenia. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 44: 282–292.
Modell, A. H. (1976). The holding environment and the therapeutic action of
psychoanalysis. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 24: 258–307.
Money-Kyrle, R. E. (1968). Cognitive development. International Journal of
Psychoanalysis, 49, 691–698.
Ogden, T. (1993) The Matrix of the Mind: Object Relations and the Psychoanalytic
Dialogue. Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield.
Ogden, T. (1994a). The analytic third: Working with intersubjective clinical facts.
Ogden, T. (1994b). Psychoanalysis and interpretive action. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 63:
219–245.
Ogden, T. H. (2004). The analytic third: Implications for psychoanalytic theory and
Ogden, T. H. (2012). Creative Readings: Essays on Seminal Analytic Works. London:
Routledge.
Racker, H. (1952). Transference and Countertransference. New York, NY: International
Universities Press.
Russell (1973). Crises of Emotional Growth (aka the Theory of the Crunch) Unpublished
manuscript.
Sandler, J. (1976). Countertransference and role-responsiveness. International Journal of
Searles, H. (1979). Countertransference and Related Subjects. Madison, CT: International
Universities Press.
Slochower, J. (1996). Holding and the fate of the analyst’s subjectivity. Psychoanalytic
Dialogues, 6: 323–353.
Stern (1983). Unformulated experience. Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 19: 71–99.
Stern, D. B. (2010). Partners in Thought: Working with Unformulated Experience,
Dissociation and Enactment. New York, NY: Routledge.
Tublin, S. (2011). Discipline and freedom in relational technique. Contemporary
50: 711–716.
Chapter 7
Revisiting the analyst as old and

new object: The analyst’s failures
and the therapeutic action of
psychoanalysis
In this chapter, I try to examine the reworking of the patient’s internal object
world that occurs as the result of a particular kind of contact with an external
object, the analyst, who struggles with it. In saying this, I believe that several
other chapters in this book actually relate to this theme, but I will try to make
it more explicit here. The analyst will fail in various ways, both in the patient’s
assessment and his own in functioning as a transference object and as an ana-
lyst helping to understand and work with this experience. Helping the patient
to integrate this failure, a part of the achievement of the depressive position,
occurs within the mind of both the patient and the analyst. It is, in a sense, a
part of how the analyst functions as a new object.
I want to emphasize that I am not talking about instances when the analyst,
through confessional comments to patients, discusses his failure. While I have
certainly sometimes found it quite useful to acknowledge elements of my par-
ticipation in enactments including my failures, I am primarily talking about
elements of the analyst’s work in his own mind that the patient can sometimes
feel throughout analytic work.
The sometimes useful kind of contact that is my focus in this chapter, a very
particular kind of “new bad object” (Cooper, 2010b), relates to the patient’s
awareness of the ebb and flow of the analyst’s struggle to remain reflective. The
analyst’s repeated struggle to remain reflective involves the repeated sequence of
the analyst being recruited to play a role in the patient’s object world, followed
by his reflection upon this recruitment and its effect on his construction of
meaning. The patient’s recruitment, and hence the content of the analyst’s self-
reflection, results both from the pull that the patient exerts upon the analyst
and from factors on the analyst’s side, including the analyst’s counter-
transference to her patient and the analytic method. The analyst’s struggle
reveals to the patient the analyst’s real limitations as a listener and constructer
of meaning, a topic that Levenson (1992) has explored at length. I will refer to
several clinical examples and vignettes in earlier chapters and another new
vignette that reflect and highlight some of this struggle that I wish to explore.
By no means do all patients benefit from this process of understanding the
analyst’s struggles with the patient’s internal world. Some patients have been
Revisiting the analyst as old and new object 117
too hurt by parental failure to productively work with the analyst’s struggles in
this regard, and for many patients, there are periods of analysis in which
negative transferences involving parental failure are too painful to absorb the
analyst’s empathic failures or enactments related to the patient’s internal world.
Clinical terms: New good and bad objects and

countertransference to the analytic method
One of the most vexing and intriguing topics in clinical psychoanalysis relates
to questions of how the analyst comes to represent elements of a new object
during the analytic process. Interest in the topic has always resided partly in the
paradox of how newness occurs in a therapy that becomes a crucible for
understanding elements of repetition and the unfolding of embedded inter-
nalized object relations. It is often the case that the particularly quality of
newness involves all too familiar, “obvious but unseen” (Bion, 1963) psychic
phenomena.
Newness has also sometimes been associated with conscious and manipulative
efforts on the part of the analyst to act in ways that contrast with the analyst’s
conception of how parents behaved (e.g., notoriously, Alexander, 1950). Con-
scious contrivances and manipulations of newness have little to do with my
exploration of the analyst’s newness. On the other hand, though, the analyst’s
unconscious retreat from and conflict with his patient and the process of trying
to understand him (e.g., Cooper, 2010b; Parsons, 2006) are sometimes at play in
his work as a new object. The analyst’s receptivity to how the patient experi-
ences and finds newness in his relationship to the analyst involves an “ethic of
hospitability” (Civitarese, 2008) about both his attunement and mis-attunement
to the patient’s unconscious life and his participation in that life within the
analytic process. Receptivity then includes a receptivity to whatever impedes or
disturbs the analyst in the process of trying to work.
I view the imaginative, interpretive efforts by the analyst to find the patient’s
new modes of expressiveness and experience as standing firmly outside these
contrivances; these efforts often reflect change within the analyst and, of course,
always beg the question as to whether the analyst has given up on or compro-
mised elements of the analytic method. Most important, the analyst’s efforts to
find the patient’s new modes of expressiveness are often among the most
important factors in helping her to examine internalized objects that cause
repetition and stultification in living.
The analyst’s newness as an agent in the therapeutic action of psychoanalysis
resides in elements of the analyst as both a new “good” and “bad” object. I
believe that the analyst’s participation as a new bad object relates to the ways
in which his countertransference to the patient or to the analytic method cause
him to be limited in his ability at particular points of work. The patient
encounters these elements of the analyst as a new object that are partly
118 Revisiting the analyst as old and new object
overlapping with and distinct from the patient’s more familiar, internalized
object experience.
Contemporary analysts from varying schools of thought have shed light on
the analyst’s participation in unconsciously obstructing the clarification of
internalized object relations. These elements of obstruction are not always
directly correlated with the patient’s internalized object relations, as has been
emphasized by many analysts (e.g., Feldman, 1997; Ogden, 1994a, 1994b, 1997;
O’Shaughnessy, 1992; Sandler, 1976a, 1976b). However, when the analyst is
able to gain purchase on the ways in which he is being recruited by the patient
to participate in familiar object relational experience, the analyst has special
inroads to the patient’s capacities for observation (e.g., LaFarge, 2004, 2007).
My attempt to elucidate the concept of the analyst as a new bad object
relates to the particularities of the analyst’s person and his personal participa-
tion in interfering with the analytic process. In a certain sense, it is also some-
times the analyst’s and the patient’s encounter with the elements of the analyst’s
new bad object participation (his struggle in interpreting elements of the
patient’s internalized world) that are intrinsic to change. This has been an
underemphasized element in descriptions of the analyst as a new object.
One important clarification regarding what I mean by the concept of psy-
choanalytic method and the analyst’s countertransference to method in the
context of this chapter: I am most interested in both the analyst’s attempts to
listen for and understand unconscious communication by the patient as well as
the analyst’s self-reflection and attunement to his own unconscious processes. I
think of method as those efforts by the analyst to understand transference,
unconscious fantasy, shifting affect, and shifting self-states so that the patient
may find unintegrated, unconscious parts of self. I am interested in what
obstructs the analyst from using his mind to help the patient to understand
these processes. This usually involves compromised capacities by the analyst
about his self-reflective participation in the analytic process.
Related to the elaboration of the new object as both a good and bad object is
the notion that in many discussions about the new object concept, there is a
conflation between how the patient experiences the analyst and how the analyst
is intending to function. For example, when the analyst is able to interpret the
patient’s attempts to recruit the analyst to engage in particular versions of
internalized object relations (e.g., Feldman, 1997), as analysts, we might say
that the analyst is functioning as a good analyst and a new object. The patient,
however, may be disappointed and angry that the analyst is not acting in ways
that are familiar to the patient and has thus becomes a “bad” object. When the
analyst enacts particular elements of the patient’s recruitment (e.g., Feldman,
1997; O’Shaughnessy, 1992), we might say that the analyst is not a “good”
object or effective analyst but that the patient is experiencing the analyst as a
familiar/good object.
From the patient’s point of view, the analyst may be experientially a bad
object at a few levels. He may be experienced as bad to the extent that he
doesn’t fulfill the patient’s expectations for his behavior from the point of view
of the internalized fantasy. As analysts observing this situation, we are likely to
view the analyst in this situation as a “good” analyst doing his job—ultimately,
a good object. In the context of trying to interpret the patient’s attempts to
repeat these earlier relationships, the patient’s experience of the analyst as a bad
object may or may not be connected to the notion that the patient is experien-
cing a negative transference in the form of repetition with an earlier dis-
appointing object. It is commonly observed by analysts from various theoretical
schools that negative transference often proceeds from deep levels of trust
between patient and analyst. The analyst may simply be frustrating to the
patient to the extent that his analytic activities are not in line with the patient’s
modes of self-cure (e.g., transference, Freud, 1909, 1912, 1914; Khan, 1970,
1973). Of course, the analyst may also be experienced as a bad object that is the
result of empathic failures based less on this discrepancy between internalized
fantasy and real behavior and more on the fact that the analyst has simply not
understood or is unable to contain something vitally important to the patient.
From the point of view of analytic technique, I would describe the analyst
who tries, more or less consistently and empathically, to draw the patient’s
attention to the discrepancy between the patient’s internalized fantasy and the
analyst’s differences from those fantasies as a good object or, if you will, a good
enough bad object (bad referring to the patient’s experience and good referring
to the analyst fulfilling the aim of interpretation). In this sense, the analyst who
tries to or is able to stay close to the aims that Feldman (1997) has spelled out is
functioning as a new good object, while the analyst who is unable to see the
patient’s efforts to recruit him in coordination with his internalized fantasies is
a new bad object. He is an old object in his congruence with the internalized
fantasy but is a new bad object in the sense that he is the patient’s analyst who
is supposed to be pointing out what he sees. He is new especially in how he
will, in very particular ways, bump against his inability to implement analytic
tools and work with the analytic process in helping the patient to observe the
unfolding of transference and unconscious fantasy. For example, Feldman
observes how the analyst’s experience of congruence and easy acceptance of the
patient may often belie various forms of blind spots and fertile ground for
enactment.
Enactments of many kinds occur when the analyst finds the patient’s
recruitment so congruous as to not be able to have interpretive purchase on
what is occurring between them. Some analysts are engaged in this recruitment
even as they think that they are analyzing particular parts of the patient. In an
earlier paper (Cooper, 2010a), I presented a case of a female analyst who
thought that she was analyzing a male patient’s early maternal needs for love
and affirmation through a kind of receptive acceptance (limited interpretation of
the meaning of these needs) during a long phase of analytic work. The analyst
was unaware that by not analyzing particular kinds of insistent demands of the
patient to recruit her in superficial forms of affirmation, she was in fact being
recruited in the repetition of facile, not heartfelt statements of praise that the
patient had experienced with his mother. The analyst’s formulations gravitated
toward seeing herself as a kind of new object in analyzing particular kinds of
maternal needs, while overlooking elements of the patient’s probing and push-
ing for repetition of particular kinds of maternal disappointment. It was
apparent to a subsequent analyst that the patient was actually not only trying to
avoid his rage toward his mother through these superficial forms of engage-
ment, but that he was unconsciously trying to repeat ways of feeling mis-
understood and was seduced into compliance with his mother. The second
analyst in a subsequent analysis functioned as a new object in the patient’s
attempts to repeat and recruit a familiar form of engagement, while at the same
time trying to show the patient how he masochistically sought to repetitively
procure exclamations of love from someone who he didn’t experience as
loving him.
I tend to believe that the analyst is always in a continuous process of inter-
action with the analytic method in understanding his patient and that it is
useful to try to keep this in mind, not only when enactments of one kind or
other are apparent, but also during all phases of analysis. There are a myriad of
ways that the analyst’s countertransference to the analytic method (Cooper, 2010c;
Parsons, 2006) interferes with both the analyst being able to function as a new
object as well as allowing a patient to experience the analyst as a new object.
There are at least two extremes of the analyst’s countertransference to the
analytic method related to new object experience. One involves the analyst’s too
active attempt or sometimes too concrete attempt to become a new object
through the circumvention of conflict rather than through the analysis of the
patient’s internalized world. The other involves countertransference that pre-
vents the analyst from perceiving how the patient is expressing new thoughts
and feelings about the analyst, despite the ways that the transference may still
be unconsciously manifesting itself. Sometimes, the analyst may also fail to see
how his own stance to the patient’s conflicts reflects his patient’s changes—in
these instances, sometimes the analyst is in the process of seeing (but not yet
fully able to see) how he is becoming in some sense new to the patient or to
himself in relation to the patient.
There is a great deal of terrain in between these two extremes of counter-
transference resistance. The analyst and patient face significant obstacles in
seeing new object experience, given the sheer force of affect related to past
experience and the perceptual predilections of each, to focus on repetition as a
dominant metaphor in most analyses. Part of the analyst’s responsibilities lie in
creating significance when the patient is able to experience new parts of
unconscious conflict or displaying new elements of integration of various parts
of self and experience. These new moments of significance are often cloaked in
familiar, old trappings (the patient’s modes of self-cure; Freud, 1915; Ferenczi,
1909; Khan, 1973) that make seeing these moments more difficult than we
sometimes realize.
Analysts toil with anxiety about enactment related to the patient’s new object
experience, including their limitations in allowing for new object experience.
The analyst will fail in various ways, both in the patient’s assessment and his
own. The analyst attempts to help the patient to integrate this failure, a part of
the achievement of the depressive position. This integration must occur in both
the mind of the patient and the analyst. How is the analyst different than
familiar objects? Is he different exclusively as a result of the patient’s experi-
ence? Does he change constantly throughout the course of his work? Are his
ways of engaging and not engaging with the patient, his ways of understanding
and not understanding in new and old ways, related to the patient’s changes?
These are fundamental questions at the heart of much theoretical diversity
among psychoanalysts.
If the analyst is to interpret the patient’s attempts to reduce the discrepancy
between the archaic internalized object and that of the analyst, in my view, it is
also important to underscore that in the conduct of many analyses, the patient
is experiencing elements of the analyst’s countertransference to the patient and
the analytic method. To the extent that the analyst is recruited, enlists, or is
drafted into service in fulfilling these roles, he is contributing to the perpetua-
tion of the patient’s problematic adaptations; in turn, the analyst’s participation
is an obstacle to analytic change and growth. In this way, the analyst sometimes
becomes a new bad object for the patient.
It is worth including these elements of the analyst as “new” for a few reasons
related to both clinical work and theory. The concept of newness is in need of
being redefined and modified in our clinical theory because it does represent
elements of the analyst’s participation in the enactments that occur. It is also
important to include a concept of the analyst’s newness since, in a certain sense,
it relates to the particularities of the analyst’s person and his personal partici-
pation. The analyst’s and the patient’s encounter with the elements of the analyst’s
new bad object participation (his struggle in interpreting elements of the patient’s
internalized world) is inevitable and often a fertile ground for exploration.
Many authors have emphasized the inevitable and necessary contribution that
analysts make to understanding the patient’s inner world (e.g., Bromberg, 1998;
Davies, 2004). LaFarge (2014) has written quite eloquently about a unique
melding of North American influence and Kleinian theory, which emphasizes
the analyst’s personal unconscious (including her own unconscious phantasies,
sometimes) as an important source of information about the patient’s
phantasies.
As is likely clear, I begin with particular biases toward the idea that trans-
ference-countertransference exists as an entity. I also begin with a comparative
bias that the various types of formulations about the new object, implicit and
explicit, in several different psychoanalytic theories, form, in Foucault’s (1984)
terms, “a membership of a systematic ensemble” (p73). It is worthwhile to dis-
entangle some of the overlap and distinctiveness within this ensemble, since I
believe that both Kleinian and American schools in some ways get at various
elements of a conflict about newness and repetition that is at the heart of ther-
apeutic action. In fact, the ways in which we as analysts form a binary between
old and new is itself a symptom of resistance to integrating the value of repe-
tition and newness as important and complementary parts of therapeutic
action.
Explicit and implicit versions of the new good and bad object: An
old and new look

I have written elsewhere (Cooper, 2004) about the intriguing, though not
surprising, tendency among psychoanalytic theorists to focus on the
analyst’s newness in the therapeutic action of analytic work as a good object.
This has been the focus of a diverse range of theorists who I will briefly
summarize.
Freud (1912) wrote of the dynamics of transference as in many ways the
patient’s attempt to include the analyst in his neurosis through the experience of
transference. The patient does so through the expression of negative transfer-
ence or “positive transference of repressed erotic impulses” (p105) and less so
through the unobjectionable positive transference. Thus the patient’s resistances
expressed through transference provide the analyst with access to the patient’s
negative impulses and repressed erotic impulses rather than by working “in
absentia or effigie” (p108).
Freud viewed the interpretation of transference as an attempt to show the
patient how he transferred self-curative mechanisms on to the analyst in the
context of neurosis. Freud’s focus was on the “sympathy” of the doctor, of his
understanding of the self-taught attempts on the patient’s part (neurosis and
transference) to cure himself. If there is any embedded and thus implicit version
of the analyst as a new object in Freud’s thinking about the dynamics of
transference, it is that through the unobjectionable transference, the analyst
lends an auxiliary observing capacity for the patient to gradually lift repression
of erotic impulses in the course of analytic work.
Strachey’s (1934) initial brilliant description of the analyst as a new object
focused on the ways in which the analyst functions as someone who absorbs,
contains and metabolizes elements of the patient’s harsh and punitive introjects.
The analyst’s interpretations ideally return the patient’s associations in a more
metabolized and less punitive form in order that the patient can reabsorb these
understandings or mutative interpretations into more usable psychic informa-
tion. For Strachey, while the new good object is able to contain and metabolize
projections, the new bad object is likely to be encountered by the patient when
the analyst is unable to sufficiently metabolize projections or to serve as an
auxiliary ego or superego. In Strachey’s view, the patient is nearly always trying
to turn the real external object of the analyst into the archaic one. The patient’s
projections threaten to transform the analyst from an external object into an
internal object.
Indeed, given Strachey’s lack of elaboration of the countertransference and

without awareness of the ways in which enactment and interaction have been
considered in all models of contemporary psychoanalysis, it is easy to see why,
for Strachey, it was inconceivable to consider the analyst as a new bad object in
any way that would contribute to therapeutic action. Yet we now know that
our patients learn to accommodate to our failures and even teach us about how
not to fail them, how to better contain even elements of our unmetabolized
experience of them (Cooper, 2000b). These were not factors explicated by
Strachey in his seminal paper. The impossibility of ever being able to fully
contain and metabolize the patient’s projections, and the analyst’s attempts to
try to work with this impossibility, are indeed one of the factors that I view as
part of the therapeutic action of psychoanalysis.
Thus I would suggest that Strachey had a “new bad object” concept embed-
ded in his paper, but he was unable to consider how the analyst’s failures to
metabolize might, at times, prove useful to the patient. It models for the patient
efforts to work with both the ubiquity of unconscious conflict and the relent-
lessness of the irrational in any person who has been well analyzed. As O’Sh-
aughnessy (1992) aptly pointed out, Strachey’s observations predate various
versions of interactional models that suggest that the analyst and patient never
work as complete isolates and can never, in absolute terms, work together as
either an absolute internal object or external object.
Until recently, there was not really an articulated theory of how the analyst
functioned as a new bad object in the therapeutic action of psychoanalysis,
despite the fact that I believe that we might be able to deconstruct a number of
theories of the new bad object in writings from Independent school, Kleinian,
relational and ego-psychologically oriented analysts. I will try to make more
explicit, a few of these embedded notions of the new bad object.
Until recent years, in the United States in particular, there has been a rather
narrow focus on the analyst’s newness as more monolithically “good” (e.g.,
Kohut, 1984; Loewald, 1960). This understandable emphasis on the analyst’s new
good object participation may have, historically, been a result of a focus and
importance from within ego psychology of the unobjectionable positive trans-
ference. I have always felt that as a concept, the unobjectionable positive trans-
ference has been too general and problematic both in clinical practice and theory
because it minimizes both the ways in which good and bad, negative and positive,
safe and dangerous, love and hate are interpenetrating experiences. This
emphasis on the unobjectionable positive transference may be related to Freud’s
(1909) and Ferenczi’s (1909) statement that sympathy is what cures the neu-
roses. Sympathy is, of course, a most complicated matter when we are discussing
circumstances in which the analyst is recruited at times to understand parts of
the patient that are persecutory or punitive. There is such a thing as sympathy
with the devil.
Loewald’s (1960) formulations of the analyst as a new object proceed largely
from the analyst’s increased abilities for rationality and objectivity in relation to
the patient’s conflicts. Loewald’s emphasis is not the analyst’s countertransference

that attunes the analyst to the patient’s conflicts and internalized objects. Instead,
he is more focused on the analyst’s ability for auxiliary observing capacities that
issue from a kind of unobjectionable positive countertransference for the patient.
However, there may very well be a kind of embedded version of the new bad
object in Loewald’s version of therapeutic action. One of Loewald’s major
contributions to understanding interpretation was to focus on the way in which
interpretation takes us one step backward into therapeutically regressive
experiences or behavior and one step forward into anticipating the patient’s
new capacities for integration of experience—a new psychic future, as it were.
It is quite often the case that patients experience the analyst as frustrating and
demanding in either or both capacities: as focusing on regressive experience or
exploring what prevents the patient from assuming more progressive, psychic
integration. Sometimes, the analyst’s anticipation of where the patient may go
as a result of interpretations is new and frustrating, just as it can be enlivening
and reassuring (e.g., Cooper, 1997). For example, to some extent, all inter-
pretation attempts to stand partly outside (and inside) the psychic world of the
patient, shedding light on the patient’s internalized and guiding unconscious
object relationships and fantasies. Interpretation by the analyst involves the
analyst not fulfilling some of the patient’s unconscious motives to recreate and
repeat earlier relationships. Even the benevolent motive of the analyst seeking
to help a patient to see or feel something new or integrate new parts of self or
to yield rigid defenses involves the analyst not “cooperating” with the patient’s
recruitment of the analyst. Therein lies a perhaps important, embedded notion
of the new bad object in Loewald’s theory of therapeutic action.
Object relations theorists of varying stripes have contributed quite sig-
nificantly to elaborations of the new object concept. Fairbairn (1952) stressed
that the new object threatens the internalized old object relation and attach-
ment. In fact, new good objects are not internalized, only bad objects, so that
they might be psychically and often omnipotently controlled. Thus new objects
are not easily seen, experienced or believed because the internalized object
relation filters this potentially new experience, discarding it and rendering it
unable to be utilized in the service of more familiar internalized scenarios that
the patient recognizes as an internal home.
Winnicott was one of the first analysts to describe the analyst functioning as
a new bad object, though his writing is filled with contradictions about this use
of the analyst. In his writing about the use of an object (Winnicott, 1969), he
describes the necessity and the inevitability at times of the analyst as establish-
ing himself as an object outside of the patient’s unconscious fantasy of omni-
potent control. He is describing the times when the analyst’s job is not that of
the environment mother who functions to bring the world to the infant. Win-
nicott was describing patients for whom it is anathema to recognize the analyst
as a separate object, and the analyst’s efforts to declare himself as such are
decidedly unwelcome.
In my view, an important reason that Winnicott’s descriptions of the use of

an object became so clinically meaningful to many analysts was related to the
universal importance of the analyst’s interpretations as external impingements
on the entrenched psychology of all individuals, not only patients for whom the
analyst as a separate object is a fundamental problem. This is partly why I
believe that many useful forms of interpretation may be regarded as a kind of
“good enough impingement” (e.g., Cooper, 2010b).
Winnicott’s descriptions of the good enough object implicitly recognized the
analyst as a new bad object, partly because the failures of the good enough
object are new, partly frustrating, and permit a greater appreciation of reality.
Good interpretations—good enough impingement, if you will—put into focus
how something about the patient’s modes of self-repair, self-cure, and self-sta-
bility are challenged and sometimes threatened by the mind of the analyst.
Winnicott (1963) was explicit in many ways in describing how the analyst’s
failures were part of therapeutic action. In “Dependence in Infant-Care, in
Child Care, and in the Psychoanalytic Setting,” he says (p113):
In the end the patient uses the analyst’s failures, often quite small ones,
perhaps maneuvered by the patient … and we have to put up with being in
a limited context misunderstood. The operative factor is that the patient
now hates the analyst for the failure that originally came as an environ-
mental factor … but that is now staged in the transference…So, in the end
we succeed by failing—failing the patient’s way.
In “The Absence and Presence of a Sense of Guilt” (Winnicott, 1966), he writes:

“There is no doubt that the pattern of the failure of the analyst if he is free
from a set pattern of his own belongs to the pattern according to which the
patient’s own environment failed at a significant stage” (p77).
Winnicott’s observations put me in mind of a patient, Arthur, a man in his
early 20s, who had felt so controlled and judged by his father during adoles-
cence that, as he graduated from college, he had limited the amount of time that
he would either talk to or visit with him. When Arthur was 14 years old, his
parents had divorced. Arthur had felt enormous support from his mother,
though she had been thoughtful about not wanting to turn Arthur against his
father. As Arthur’s analysis developed, it became clear for a long period of time
in our work that much of what I had to say or observe was experienced by
Arthur as a form of criticism or control. Arthur’s fantasies often led him to feel
that as a father, I would want Arthur to find a way to accept his father’s sig-
nificant limitations (a partially accurate read on some of my conscious thoughts
and feelings). In his fantasies, I would want Arthur to accept his father, even if
it meant submitting to his father’s judgments and arbitrary constructions of
reality.
At one point, the transference became so intense that nearly every time I
began to say something, Arthur viewed me as trying to limit his anger toward
his father and, more importantly, toward me. Arthur became convinced that I
was unable to accept the intensity of his anger toward me. I held a most com-
plex set of feelings about these situations. I had some things to say to Arthur
about the ubiquity of his projected internal object father onto many of his
work, romantic and analytic experiences. But it was also true that I felt a level
of anxiety about the degree to which Arthur would be able to view his experi-
ences of me as part of an emerging transference rather than as a more simple
view of reality. As time went on, I began to hear more and more from Arthur
that he was actually doing his job as a patient by “letting it rip” and that I was
actually overly anxious about his concretization of our relationship. I believe
that Arthur included me quite vividly in his experience of his father’s failures
and that I was placed into a psychic situation in which, for me at least, it was
impossible not to fail him. He experienced me as listening to him about these
failures, which during this period of intense negative transference was a sig-
nificant form of help and collaboration between us and marked a gradual
transition in our work.
Smith’s body of work (e.g., Smith, 2000, 2003) charted how the analyst is
inevitably listening in conflictual ways that inform his listening. This orienta-
tion toward listening to the analyst’s “disturbance” in his listening (e.g.,
Cooper, 2010b; Cooper, 2006) is, in my view, essential in the consideration of
how the analyst functions as a new object in analytic work. In recent years, a
few American analysts have explored the analyst as a new bad object in the
therapeutic action of psychoanalysis (e.g., Cooper, 2004; Davies, 2004; Men-
delsohn, 2002), which I have reviewed elsewhere (e.g. Cooper, 2010b). These
analysts have described various kinds of enactments in which a patient finds
parts of the analyst that he is looking for because of internalized unconscious
fantasies and internalized object relations. I believe that several Kleinian ana-
lysts have, without any reference to the analyst as a new object, included some
implicit versions of the analyst functioning as a new object in disentangling
phantasy. It is worth trying to think about how these different traditions might
inform one another as we examine the new bad object in the therapeutic action
of psychoanalysis.
For example, several contemporary Independent tradition and Kleinian ana-
lysts have elaborated ways in which the analyst is sensitized to the patient’s
experience of the analyst as an old object with its attendant repetition of earlier
object relations, while at the same time viewing it as inevitable that the analyst will
enact various elements of these internalized fantasies over the course of analysis.
Parsons (2006, 2007) depicts how the analyst tries to be attuned to the ways in
which his own disturbances in listening to the patient inform old object experi-
ences in new ways with the patient based on his particular abilities and limita-
tions as an analyst. In a sense, the analyst is a new object in the ways that he will
both help understand, obstruct, and enact the patient’s unconscious conflicts.
Feldman (1997) has usefully emphasized that what is projected into the ana-
lyst is a phantasy of an object relationship that evokes not only thoughts and
feelings, but also propensities towards action. From the patient’s point of view,
the projections represent an attempt to reduce the discrepancy between the
phantasy of some archaic object relationship and what the patient experiences
in the analytical situation. Feldman has illustrated how the analyst, too,
experiences impulses to function in ways that lead to a greater correspondence
with some needed or desired phantasies. The interaction between the patient’s
and the analyst’s needs may lead to painful repetitive enactments that pose
problems for the analyst to temporarily recover his capacity for reflective
thought. Yet for Feldman, while inevitable, the analyst’s functioning as a ther-
apeutic agent involves restoring this position of listening to the patient’s phan-
tasy rather than a view that the patient will benefit from the ways in which the
analyst is unable to continuously do this.
Feldman notes that the difficulty is compounded when the projection into the
analyst leads to subtle or overt enactments that do not initially disturb the
analyst, but on the contrary constitute a comfortable collusive arrangement in
which the analyst feels his role is congruent with some internal phantasy. In
other words, when the patient’s psychotherapeutic treatment of himself (Fer-
enczi, 1909; Freud, 1915) is agreeable or congruent with the analyst’s way of
seeing the patient, it may be difficult to recognize the defensive function that
this interaction serves both for the patient and the analyst and the more dis-
turbing unconscious phantasies it defends against.
One obvious example of this congruence occurs when the analyst believes
that the patient “needs” the analyst to understand him in particular ways that
are comfortable or deemed necessary by the analyst. I think that it’s almost a
given that this occurs in many analyses for periods of time, particularly when
the analyst has determined that a patient is not yet ready to examine particular
kinds of feelings, states, conflicts and defenses. The analyst’s determination of
what a patient “needs” or doesn’t need by way of interpretation is often fertile
ground for examining how the analyst is being recruited in one mode or other
or incorporated into particular internalized object relations. It is, of course,
always important to pay attention to the possibility that as an analysis devel-
ops, the patient is being recruited by the analyst in particular ways as well and
that they are working within a reciprocal exchange regarding enactments of
internalized fantasies with each other.
Both Britton (1998) and LaFarge (2004, 2007) have captured the melding of
enactment of the patient’s unconscious phantasy and personal factors that lead the
analyst to incorrectly construct meaning, and through the analyst’s self-reflection,
to set the analyst back on track to explore these unconscious phantasies.
It is my own view, in agreement with O’Shaughnessy (1992), Feldman (1997),
Britton (1998), and LaFarge (2004, 2007), that the analyst at times enacts var-
ious forms of resistance to the patient’s efforts to reduce the discrepancy
between the patient’s internalized fantasies and the participation of the analyst.
I would add, however, that the analyst is at times unable to see efforts by the
patient to induce him into new forms of behavior as a new object and that not
all of the patient’s psychic efforts are aimed to repeat this old object experience.
The patient may in fact have thwarted hopes and wishes that are still seeking to
find ways for expression. The patient’s efforts to reduce the discrepancy
between his internalized fantasies and the participation of the analyst and
efforts of the patient to create new elements of object relating are by no means
mutually exclusive possibilities. Indeed, I have observed that the patient himself
experiences conflict as analysis develops with regard to the wish to repeat and
the attempt to try new experiences in the analytic relationship. It often the case
that patients seek to recreate old object experience while expressing various
kinds of wishes and fantasies for new experience that are different than what
they encountered during development. This is a way that the patient is always
trying to hold on to self-stability while changing, while the analyst is experien-
cing these different parts of the patient at different times (e.g., Bromberg, 1998;
2006; 2011).
The analyst also struggles to see new ways that he is relating to his patient
within the old and new object continuum. I have sometimes noticed changes in
the countertransference that I was slow to realize heralded changes within the
patient’s inner world (e.g., Cooper & Levit, 1998).
A relatively routine brief example might illustrate elements of what I mean
by new bad object participation and my efforts to redress these disruptions in my
participation. I say that they are routine because it is an example of enactment
and recovery of the analyst’s process of trying to retrospectively understand
enactment.
The patient, Olivia, is a woman in her mid-20s in a four times a week ana-
lysis who had been sexually abused as a young teenager by a sports coach. The
patient hesitantly and very indirectly tried to speak to her parents about this
but felt that they wouldn’t or couldn’t really absorb the information, deflecting
it and adding to her discomfort and shame about even trying to discuss the
matter. Olivia held many generalized feelings about being invisible to her par-
ents. No matter how hard she toiled to be loveable and cooperative, her efforts
were not really significant in comparison to her more frivolous but, in her view,
more loveable and fetching younger sister. Immediately prior to and during the
beginning of her analysis, Olivia became intermittently enraged at her parents,
who had since divorced when she went away to college.
When Olivia began analysis with me, she expressed wishes for me to help her
from getting into destructive and masochistic relationships with men. She was
simultaneously expressive of avoidant wishes to not tell me about her various
relationships for fear that I would be critical of her being too open and sexually
active with men she didn’t know well. She told me stories about men finding
her sexually irresistible and her having sex with them despite not really being
sure that she wanted to. Olivia was flirtatious with men and with me but in
ways that were only partly conscious.
I noticed relatively early in our work at times that I felt a pull to be far more
active than I am usually, mostly in trying to see if she could reflect on various
feelings while sensing that she was quite dissociated and disconnected from
feelings of self-protection. For example, if Olivia expressed something like
(laughing) “I know that I don’t want to talk to you about some things,” this
would create in me a sense of excitement and fantasies of trying to “get” her to
try to talk about these matters that would sometimes lead to a more active
questioning. This wouldn’t be my usual response to a patient communicating in
this way. I would more customarily continue to listen to see if the patient
would communicate to me about what she was avoiding through displacement,
or I would consider that the thing that she thought she was avoiding was
actually something different or even something that she was, in fact, not
avoiding at all. I would wonder, as I actually did to some extent, whether the
patient was inviting me to be more active or to pursue or be seduced by her. Or
I might consider that the patient was communicating the opposite feeling—that
she wished to speak of things that she was consciously avoiding. I was also
aware that the patient was working very hard in analysis to integrate various
parts of herself and that she was on a track to do this that represented a con-
siderable shift in psychological direction.
I sensed that Olivia’s allusions to being avoidant had a somewhat seductive
quality, but I was more aware of being recruited as a concerned parent. I felt
that the patient wished for me to not be a neglectful mother and father but that
her allusion to be avoidant was a kind of compromise in which she vaguely and
fleetingly could experience or mention wanting to understand something related
to concern, while at the same time pushing these wishes away. I also silently
wondered about the extent to which Olivia expressed feelings about awareness
of being avoidant in a somewhat dissociated state in which her experiences of
avoiding were largely inchoate and not well-integrated states.
On several occasions, Olivia noted my increased activity and contrasted it
with her general feeling that she had freedom and time to elaborate feelings and
thoughts. It took me many sessions before I began to see how this increased
activity on my part grew out of erotic stimulation and was a new form of
neglect, a form of neglect that superficially reflected concern and attention but
that unwittingly, repeatedly collapsed the analytic opportunity to learn more
about my patient’s thoughts and feelings. This awareness began to frame more
and more of my work with the patient as analysis went underway.
Rather than focus my attention, interpretations, and inquiry to what she
might be communicating to me at an unconscious level (e.g., “I think that you
might be wanting to stir up interest and protection for you in a way that you
can’t provide yourself and didn’t feel as a child”), I found myself more prone to
making big, intellectualized formulations or, as I suggested earlier, more
aggressively “pursuing” Olivia in order to find out, uncover what she was
avoiding. I was aware of a tendency to try to solve things in the analytic hour
and not listen and absorb her affects and thoughts.
I was receptive to Olivia’s recruitment for protection from a parent for some
reasons of my own and some that involved the patient’s unconscious pressure,
one that was in turn unconsciously sexualized by both the patient and by me. In
an unconsciously enacted version of trying not to be the familiar old neglectful
parent, I’d become familiar to the extent that I collapsed the analytic space in
such a way that she was invisible, unable to tell her story or enact her story in
the way that she might have been more inclined to.
With Olivia, I was able to privately notice how peculiar my stance had
become through both various experiences of dysregulation that I’d observed as
well as my patient noting how my voice had changed in volume and rapidity of
speech. These kinds of episodes occurred in two sessions two months apart,
and when the second episode occurred, I was able to start understanding that I
had unconsciously believed in a kind of heroic fantasy that I would be able to
protect Olivia from the many sorts of mistakes that she was making with men.
I began to realize that the seductive ways that she invited me to chase her were
not unlike those she employed with men and that she wished me to chase her
and to pin her down, as it were, in an attempt to corral her in and protect her
from her own disconnected impulses to sexualize relationships prior to knowing
a man. I very much believed that making Olivia even more aware of my
observations of myself would have constituted a kind of forcing her into feeling
and receiving parts of me that I was disappointed in or ashamed of, including
my unconscious excitement and heroic fantasies. I began to feel more familiar
to myself as an analyst, listening to and observing my patient rather than trying
to fix a catastrophe that had already occurred long before we had met (Bion,
1959).
Concluding thoughts
I believe that these elements of the analyst as a new bad object are quite
common and to some extent overlap with Feldman’s notion of the analyst’s
contribution to unconscious communication in the projective identification
process. These phenomena also overlap to some extent with O’Shaughnessy’s
(1992) descriptions of “excursions” that derail the analyst’s attention to what
the patient is communicating about in terms of internalized fantasies.
In some ways, the analytic process is an unnatural act, a form of thoughtful,
therapeutic, posturing that covers up our irrational analytic self. To the extent
that we understand that psychoanalysis is a peculiar form of human engage-
ment, it helps to illuminate how our countertransference to a particular patient
will always be expressed through our method. We begin with particular pre-
dilections to respond to elements of technique in different ways. Each of us
might have different levels of wish or comfort with being the object of intense
affect in the transference, just as we are each different in our tendencies to feel
excluded from the transference (e.g., Steiner, 2008). Some of the elements of the
analyst as a new bad object then will be related to the ways in which the patient
experiences the analyst’s implementation of method. If an analyst is unable to
listen reflectively to a patient who is making her best effort to do so while
unconsciously trying to do just the opposite, he may become and enact elements
of a new bad object.
This is a place in which Kleinian and American object relational theories
(e.g., Mitchell, 1995; Bromberg, 1998) have a potentially a useful form of dis-
course. These elements of new badness, if you will, may have a great deal to do
with the analyst’s personality that the patient comes to know through his failure
to be an analyst. All analysts fail our patients as analysts, and as much as these
failures may reenact or repeat the failures of earlier objects, we are also intro-
ducing new elements of our personal participation.

The important differences in understanding these two schools of thought likely
relate to how or whether these failures are discussed with patients, but may also
relate to how we discuss these failures with our colleagues in our written reports.
I would not automatically say that I would or wouldn’t discuss my particular
forms of limitation with a patient during the analysis. Most of these times, my
limitations are noted in the privacy of my clinical sensibility, but if they are frank and
obvious failures of technique, there are times when I will acknowledge them with my
patients. If I were inclined to discuss it in some way, I would hope to reflect on the
purpose of such discussion. Might I be trying to deflect from the patient’s
disappointment, to seek her forgiveness (e.g., Feldman, 1993); repeat elements of
earlier parental figures who wished to be taken care of by the child; ask the patient to
once again behave through a pseudo-mature adaptation; unconsciously sexualize the
relationship through bearing my skin as an analyst—getting naked; collapse the
analytic space through a form of boundary diffusion or confusion; or submit to my
patient through an identification with a masochistic part of the patient?
In contrast, however, I wouldn’t want to automatically assume that in
acknowledging a failure I was collapsing the analytic space or surrendering the
opportunity for symbolic rendering of an interpretive third. I would want to
consider whether by not acknowledging failure I was recreating circumstances
in which the patient had been forced to question her reality testing or be
unclear about what was specious reasoning. It is also possible that not
acknowledging failure might repeat elements of punishing the patient for her
autonomy, reinforcing her tendencies for self-loathing or self-reproach. There
are instances when it seems to me to be bordering on undermining a patient’s
sense of reality not to confirm something that the patient and analyst fully
understand to be a failure on the part of the analyst.
References
Alexander, F. (1950). Analysis of the therapeutic factors in psychoanalytic treatment.
Bion, W. R. (1959). Attacks on linking. In Second Thoughts (pp93–109). London:
Karnac, 1984.
Bion, W. R. (1963). Elements of Psychoanalysis. London: Heinemann.
Britton, R. (1998). Belief and Imagination. London: Routledge.
Bromberg, P. M. (1998). Standing in the Spaces: Essays on Clinical Process, Trauma, and
Dissociation. Hillsdale, NJ: Analytic Press.
Bromberg, P. M. (2006). Awakening the Dreamer. Hillsdale: The Analytic Press.
Civitarese, G. (2008). The Intimate Room: Theory and Technique of the Analytic Field.
London: Routledge.
Cooper, S. H. (1997). Interpretation and the psychic future. International Journal of
Cooper, S. H. (2000a). Objects of Hope: Exploring Possibility and Limit in Psycho-

analysis. Hillsdale, NJ: The Analytic Press.
Cooper, S. H. (2000b). Mutual containment in the psychoanalytic process. Psycho-
analytic Dialogues, 10: 166–189.
Cooper, S. H. (2004). State of the hope: The new bad object and the therapeutic action
of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 14: 527–553.
Cooper, S. H. (2010a). Self-criticism and unconscious grandiosity: Transference-
countertransference dimension. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 91:
1115–1136.
Cooper, S. H. (2010b). A Disturbance in the Field: Essays in Transference-Counter-
Cooper, S. H. (2010c). An elusive aspect of the analyst’s relationship to transference.
Psychoanalysis Quarterly, 79: 349–380.
Cooper, S., & Levit, D. (1998). Old and new objects in Fairbairnian and American
relational theory. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 8: 603–624.
Davies, J. M. (2004). Whose bad objects are we anyway? Repetition and our elusive love
affair with evil. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 14: 711–732.
Feldman, M. (1993). The dynamics of reassurance. International Journal of Psycho-
analysis, 74: 275–285.
Ferenczi, S. (1909). Introjection and transference. In Contributions to Psychoanalysis
(pp35–93). New York, NY: Basic Books.
Foucault, M. (1984). Architecture /Mouvement/ Continuité, October, 1984; (Des Espace
Autres, March 1967; Translated from the French by J. Miskowiec) Of Other Spaces:
Utopias and Heterotopias.
Freud, S. (1909). Letter to Jung, Letter 134F. In W. McGuire (Ed.), The Freud-Jung
Letters: The Correspondence between Sigmund Freud and C. G. Jung (pp209–211).
Freud, S. (1912). The dynamics of transference. In J. Strachey (Ed. & Trans.), The
pp97–107). London, UK: Hogarth Press.
Freud, S. (1914). Remembering, repeating and working-through. In J. Strachey (Ed. &
Trans.), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund
Freud (Vol. 12, pp145–155). London, UK: Hogarth Press.
Freud, S. (1915). Observations on transference-love. In J. Strachey (Ed. & Trans.), The
pp. 157–173). London, UK: Hogarth Press.
Khan, M. (1970). Toward an epistemology of cure. In The Privacy of the Self. New
York, NY: International Universities Press.
Khan, M. (1973). The role of illusion in the analytic space and process. Annuals of
Kohut, H. (1984). How Does Analysis Cure? (A. Goldberg & P. Stepansky, Eds.).
Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
LaFarge, L. (2004). The imaginer and the imagined. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 73: 591–625.
LaFarge, L. L. (2007). Commentary on “The meanings and uses of countertransference,”
by Heinrich Racker. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 76: 795–815.
LaFarge, L. L. (2014). How and why unconscious phantasy and transference are the defining
features of psychoanalytic practice. International Journal of Psychoanalysis: 1265–1278
Levenson, E. A. (1992). Mistakes, errors, and oversights. Contemporary Psychoanalysis,
28: 555–571.
Loewald, H. (1960). International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 41:16–33.
Mendelsohn, E. (2002). The analyst’s bad enough participation. Psychoanalytic
Dialogues, 12: 331–358.
Mitchell, S. (1995). Interaction in the Kleinian and Interpersonal Traditions.
Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 31: 65.
Ogden, T. (1994a). The analytic third: Working with intersubjective clinical facts.
Ogden, T. (1994b). Psychoanalysis and interpretive action. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 63:
219–245.
Ogden, T. (1997). Reverie and metaphor. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 78: 719–732.
Sandler, J. (1976a). Dreams, unconscious fantasies, and identity of perception. International
Review of Psycho-Analysis, 3: 33–42
Sandler, J. (1976b). Countertransference and role-responsiveness. International Journal
Smith, H. (2003). Conceptions of conflict in psychoanalytic theory and practice.
Steiner, J. (2008). Transference to the analyst as an excluded observer. International
Strachey, J. (1934). On the therapeutic action of psychoanalysis. International Journal of
Winnicott, D. W. (1963). Dependence in infant care, in child care, and in the
psychoanalytic setting. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 44: 339–344.
Winnicott, D. W. (1966). The absence and presence of a sense of guilt illustrated in two
patients. In C. Winnicott, R. Shepherd, & M. Davis (eds.), D. W. Winnicott:
Psychoanalytic explorations. London: Karnac, 1989.
50: 711–716.
Chapter 8
Reflections on the aesthetics of

the psychic boundary concept:
Uses and misuses
When Freud invented or discovered the patient’s free association and the notion
of the analyst allowing her mind to be adrift, he invented a new kind of art, a
psychoanalytic and therapeutic art. He also invented a new kind of art when he
essentially thematized subjectivity. Freud’s invention of psychoanalysis sat at
the border of the medical world, social science and the arts, and not unlike
some other paradigm shifts in art, was a way of getting at another different and
sometimes deeper subjectivity than that portrayed through our more conven-
tional descriptions of the outside world. He pioneered the art of exploring
unconscious experience.
In developing a few ideas about the nature of psychological boundaries in
psychoanalysis, my purpose is twofold. First I want to explore some of the
aesthetic elements of our use of the psychological boundary concept. By the
term, “aesthetic” in reference to elements of the boundary concept, I mean that
the term itself is a fragile, metaphoric construction that allows us to explore
fantasy, affect, symbols and elements of shared and unique realities. Psycho-
analysis hinges on a social compact by patients and analysts to open up otherwise
forbidden territories offered through this metaphoric construction.
In the second part of the chapter, I would like to raise some questions about
what I regard as the problematic extension of the boundary concept to describe
breaches in ethical behavior and sexual misconduct. On a pragmatic level, I
believe that psychoanalysts are likely the most capable group to describe the
myriad of reasons that lead to sexual misconduct. Instead, through the use of
the term, “boundary violation” we have compromised perhaps the most pivotal
and rich metaphoric construct for working in psychoanalysis (i.e., the boundary
concept) and conflated it with forensic discourse which, in turn, undermines our
capacity to explore psychic phenomena.
I want to make a case for the notion that we reserve the term boundary for
the psychic realm because the psychic boundaries of psychoanalysis are so fun-
damentally complex, dense and intrinsically confusing that bringing in the
realm of behavioral ethical violations is actually unnecessarily vague and mys-
tifying. We know that there is an invisible or barely visible boundary that
divides everyday life from the particular frame of psychoanalytic work and that
Reflections on the aesthetics of the psychic boundary 135
this boundary is crossed when analysts break from sexual abstinence. Yet I
believe that we already have and need to develop more precise ways to describe
sexual misconduct than with the always shifting metaphor of psychic bound-
aries and borders.
How are these important matters relevant to questions related to the ana-
lyst’s work and experience of the depressive position? My hope is that this
chapter involves another exploration of some subtle forms of avoidance and
unwitting obfuscation on the part of us as analysts in referring to this mis-
conduct as a boundary violation. To the extent that a breach in ethical behavior

does involve actual failure by the analyst, this chapter does have an important
place in any discussion of how we struggle as analysts.
Notes on the aesthetics of psychoanalysis as psychic

boundary art
Freud (1914, p154) described transference as “a playground in which [the neu-
rosis] is allowed to expand in almost complete freedom … [which] thus creates
an intermediate region between illness and real life through which the transition
from one to the other is made.” Freud’s imaginative construction of an “inter-
mediate region” where psychic elements are free to expand and play illustrates
the way I think the boundary concept works in psychoanalysis. The analyst and
the patient use their implicit knowledge of virtual and fluid psychic “bound-
aries” in order to think and work with another mind in novel, exploratory
ways. In this sense, the patient and analyst are a kind of boundary artist.
Perhaps the most important issue related to boundaries that was understood
by Freud is the automatic tendency for dissemblance. Our minds at once offer
marvelous imaginative possibility and are to some extent prisons, representing
constraint that we have internalized and taken on board in becoming civilized.
We seek escape. We are never entirely comfortable with the extent to which we
are imprisoned, and as Nietzsche (1889) pointed out, our minds, through art,
also provide us with opportunity for creative escape, solace, and excitement—
“that without art we might die of boredom” (p79). Psychoanalysis, among other
things, allows us to explore our discomfort and to help us determine if we can
become more comfortable with constraints and freedoms and to know more
about our dissemblance in order that we may lead more creative lives.
Freud’s invention put us permanently at risk of not knowing where his
invention will take us. As Bromberg (2006, p135) has put it, psychoanalysts are
“artists of uncertainty.” Like Daedalus, the father of architecture who sought
escape from imprisonment for he and his son Icarus, Freud invented analysis so
that we might leave the bondage of internalized objects. Freud and Daedalus
each invented methods that offer hope and opportunity for relief, but there is
the possibility of pilot error, to be sure.
The art that Freud invented is what I think of as a kind of boundary art.
Grossman (1992) suggested that Freud invented ‘boundary science.’ The word
136 Reflections on the aesthetics of the psychic boundary
boundary is itself a most complex word, given Freud’s fundamental under-

standing of the unconscious as the driver of our own dissemblance and not
knowing. I love the term boundary for its beauty, folly and its ambitiously
playful invitation to distort through illusions what we think we know that we
don’t really know. The term itself reflects the need we have as humans to
earnestly, humorously and sometimes pathetically locate where we are when we
really don’t know. We put down stakes on a lonely and tiny frontier in a uni-
verse that is utterly indifferent to us, one that subjects each of us to an uncer-
tain fate at an uncertain time. Boundaries help us to manage this overwhelming

existential reality by creating illusions to facilitate speaking to each other about
what we think we are saying that we cannot fully know we are saying.
Boundaries are shared illusions about what belongs to us and what belongs
to the other. In psychoanalysis, we locate intrinsically blurry denotations with
terms such as fantasy, reality and transference. Boundaries are a part of how we
play with our knowing and not knowing, our illusions, and our sadness about
our limitations in knowing. Boundaries are pretend play words (omnipotent
fantasies) about thinking that we own or are owned by a powerful other. The
word itself allows us to think that we know the difference between self and
other or the demarcation and coordinates between inside and outside. We are,
in a sense, akin to small children saying that this is mine and that is yours
through our use of the term boundary.
Boundary, in these senses of the word, involves as much verb as noun and is
not unlike the word play, which while sometimes used as a noun is best
understood as an activity. In fact, the concepts of boundary and play are really
impossible to use without reference to each other. They make each other pos-
sible, and both are always at work in psychoanalysis.
In beginning psychoanalysis, we are asking our patients to live outside the
law in an unconventional terrain, one that loosens the rules of social and dis-
cursive engagement, in which we take liberties about translating what someone
is saying that he doesn’t know he is saying. This kind of translation was cap-
tured by Dylan’s words “license to kill” as he tried to capture what poetry
achieves and how poetry works. I think that Dylan was referring to “killing” as
the killing of usual meaning and the freedom to create. It is an artistic act to do
the translating of psychoanalysis as well as the type of communicating that
occurs in psychoanalysis. This living outside the law is what I mean by the
patient and analyst as boundary artists, and it is why I regard what we do as a
kind of therapeutic art. It’s probable that the act of thematizing subjectivity
in all human interaction, another of Freud’s primary inventions, is itself a
therapeutic act.
In an essay entitled “The Wilderness of Childhood,” Michael Chabon (2009)
discussed a very disturbing shift in our very idea of childhood in which adventure
itself is no longer valued by our society in the way it once was. The wilderness
of the outdoor life in suburbs is now occupied by neighbors, and for many
children, scheduled activities have replaced unstructured time. In some ways,
the adventures of saying what comes to mind are also minimized by our culture
now. As Chabon wisely points out, one of the best ways to get to know a
geographical place is to get lost in it a few times, really lost. I like this as an
analogy to the notion of getting lost with our minds. As we get lost, our
moorings or sense of psychic boundary is often changed and confused as
patients and sometimes as analysts.
If, as David Foster Wallace once told an interviewer (McCaffery, 2012), the
purpose of fiction is to give the reader, “marooned in her own skull” (p101),
access to the lives and minds of other selves, so the analytic patient associates,
opens things up, and temporarily gets lost in order to gain access to other elements
of his own selfhood. The abstract expressionist painter Richard Diebenkorn
(1993) suggested that he seeks to “find an image that is more mine than the
thought I had in my head” (p1). The contemporary painter Amy Sillman (2014)
describes painting as devotion to a process of transformation.
As a boundary artist, the psychoanalyst maintains positions in various
aspects of psychic boundaries but is always trying to be aware of our tendency
to become overly concrete in our ways of talking about boundaries. Since the
particular border of everyday life and rules of engagement in the framework of
analysis is always a threat to be crossed in the imagination of the patient and
analyst, and because it has been repeatedly crossed in the history and mythology
of our everyday lives, it is easy for our imaginative capacities to become truncated.
Repeated actual ethical transgressions and the threat of such can easily make us
lose sight of the artistry of the psychoanalyst as a boundary artist.
If, as Freud suggested, we can’t entirely trust ourselves in knowing what we
claim to know, acceptance of the fact that we don’t know what we are saying
in analytic work creates a radical boundary problem. We put our minds in the
mind of another trained professional to see if he or she can help us understand
more about what we were feeling or saying. Contemporary analytic thinking
that questions the authority of the analyst has done so in some ways because
the unreliability of the analyst’s mind is now better accepted as a given in the
analytic situation. Bion had a great deal to do with advancing this particular
idea, and of course it was developed significantly by the epistemological revo-
lution in analytic thinking created by analysts such as Schafer, Mitchell, Donnel
Stern and Hoffman.
Psychoanalysis puts us into a dissociated relationship to the dictum “This
above all: To thine own self be true.” We find ourselves in the midst of a con-
fusion about the truth that we are trying to make sense of and get some pur-
chase on, always in some imperfect manner. Psychoanalysis is embedded in the
notion that we seek some modicum of clarity about the nature of this dis-
sociated relationship to the truth.
Boundary as activity—that is, as something that is not permanent but always
evolving—involves our attempt to gain more purchase or clarity on our con-
fusing relationship to our mind’s truth. Inspiring analytic work, like very good
fiction writing or film, invites us to explore meaning; and yet, when all is said
and done (never, by the way, is all said and done), some ambiguity often reigns
over crisp clarity and harmony. Good analysis allows us to develop a greater
capacity for holding this unsettling narrative. That is, in the end, what we do
and what we help our patients to do.
There is a kind of complex mixture of earnestness and falseness to the analyst’s
request for the patient to take the leap of faith and say what comes to mind. As
part of the analyst’s method, he wants the patient to express as much as possible
because he has been trained to understand what the patient is saying and
because he has been analyzed in order to make himself useful to the patient
without requiring the patient to gratify his own needs in too overpowering a
manner.
The analyst, despite his discomfort with this request, nevertheless suggests it
because it is part of his method (Cooper, 2010b; Parsons, 2007). There is always
a kind of false or counter-phobic component to the invitation to say what
comes to mind. Analysts, like our parents, do and do not want the patient to
say everything that comes to mind and do and do not understand what’s going
on. They are, to varying degrees, anxious about how to be human beings and
certainly about how to be analysts and parents. Some of us are more composed
or confused about this than others. Some of us use defenses (a kind of boundary
formation) that minimize what we know, while others use defenses to buttress
our illusions that we do know what’s going on. At some level, we are all in a
state of existential, if not actual, equivalence about not knowing.
This element of dissemblance or inauthenticity on the part of the analyst is
understandable and possibly unavoidable, but it is useful, I think, to understand
that it is sometimes confusing to our patients. These types of dissemblance get
worked out in good analyses as they are featured in transferences. Patients
find the heart of the analyst, her strengths and weaknesses. Patients acclimate
to our vulnerabilities, our forms of self-deception, our psychological limits.
When analysis gets more centrally organized around the limitations of the
analyst, in ways that cannot be understood as either part of the patient’s
problems to work out or as part of the analyst’s responsibility to understand
in terms of her impact on the patient, there is a much more serious impasse
and stalemate.
The psychoanalyst as boundary artist works at the border of the concrete
and symbolic, figurative and abstract, in the borderlands or “playground” of
fantasy and consensual reality, dream and waking life. This borderland is where
we live in figuring out what comes from the patient’s mind, our own mind, and
the third psychic realities that emerge from patient and analyst being together.
Our language in psychoanalysis is the border language of metaphor. Through
the use of metaphor as our border language, we are trying to see something new
about what is apparent, in a sense questioning what is obvious as a defensive
construction.
In a certain way, relative to conventional discourse and our other non-
familial relationships, psychoanalysis begins with the frightening fact that we
are trying to enter into the patient’s mind. Bolognini (2014) has interestingly
distinguished psychoanalysis from psychotherapy as a form of “psychic coha-
bitation.” Levine (2013) suggested that it might also be considered as a kind of
“mutual mental squatting.” For after all, as analysis develops, patients learn
that they have entered into our minds.
I find it especially useful to think about analysis as beginning with the two
participants entering and living in the minds of the other. This view stands in
contrast to the way in which we think about these processes as exclusively
developing through transference. While transference involves the deepening of

these experiences about how we live in each other’s minds, in certain ways,
transference is what allows us to get more distance and purchase on this
boundary blurring. Freud’s (1915) original observations about transference
focused on transference as the patient’s way of including the analyst in his
neurosis. In other words, transference is not only what makes our relation-
ship to one another more blurry. It is also what provides figurability and
understanding about how we live in the minds of each other, a point made
well by Spezzano (2007): It is through what we say to our patients about
their minds that they come to know “who lives in our mind in a way that allows
the patient to feel at home there as the character whom we interpret him/her to
be” (p1579).
Freud asserted that transference is a universal psychic phenomenon of the
human mind and that this tendency is embedded in social discourse. He also
discovered that the therapeutic relationship is nearly coterminous with what has
been called the psychotherapeutic setting (Modell, 1991). This observation
among his most important and vexing contributions to the theory of technique,
established that the boundary between what comes from the patient and analyst
would be blurred. But he also insisted that the power of the method rests on the
capacity to maintain this level of complexity and blurring.
Parsons (2006) expresses beautifully the need for the analyst to maintain an
openness to the blurred nature of psychic boundaries in stating that “The
most important happenings in both the analyst’s and the patient’s internal
worlds lie at the boundary between conscious and unconscious, and the nature
of an analyst’s interventions depends on how fully what happens at that
boundary is articulated in the analyst’s consciousness” (p1193). In showing
that our best interventions in some sense short circuit consciousness,
Parat (1976) also touched on the notion that analysts are a kind of boundary
artist. And, of course, Bion’s appropriation of Keats’s (1952) notion of nega-
tive capability got at the same phenomena: to be “capable of being in uncer-
tainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and
reason” (p37).
It is simultaneously obvious but in some ways unseen how psychoanalysis
itself contains elements of boundary confusion and boundary crossing in terms
of what we don’t know that we are trying to know. What is obvious is that
psychoanalysis is predicated on the exploration of the patient’s mind that will
be experienced and translated through the analyst’s mind with all of his
strengths and vulnerabilities. Indeed, psychoanalysis explores the ever-blurry
boundary between what is inside and what is outside, what is old and new, and
what is clear but later seen as defensively clear because it gave us an anchor for
a period of time. Psychoanalysis explores what is known to us and what lies in
the vast territory of the psychic unknown.
The artistry of psychoanalysis is to transform psychic pain into something
that is more bearable or, in the best of circumstances, even something that we
might use to live more creatively. As Rilke (1922) put it, “Beauty is nothing but
the beginning of terror that we are still just able to bear” (p35). As analysts we
try to develop this capacity to bear terror and ugliness. Clive Bell (1914) stated
that “The artist is not trying to produce pretty or even beautiful form, he is
engaged in the most important task of re-creating his ruined internal world and
the resulting form will depend on how well he succeeds in his task” (p59). The
patient is a creator and onlooker to this beauty and ruin, and as analysts, we
are trying to help bear and hold this ruined state.
Caution is well advised, but too much caution means that we might never
make contact with the patient and thus not help the patient to make contact
with new parts of himself. Too little caution means that we might overwhelm
the patient and actually make him feel his “catastrophe” (Bion, 1959) too
vividly and without hope for integration. Perhaps this position is related to one
described by Richard Diebenkorn (1993) in his “Notes to Myself on Beginning a
Painting.” He stated that he aims “to be careful only in a perverse way” (p1).
As it relates to the analytic situation, and particularly the question of bound-
aries, being careful in a perverse way involves the analyst’s self-reflective
adventurousness in trying to know about the patient’s and his own related
wilderness. We are perverse in knowing that we cannot undo the catastrophe of
what Bion described as the missing function. Our efforts are perversely guided
by the awareness that we nearly always offer a different kind of help than the
patient might desire. But we are careful in that we must negotiate a dialogue
about a different kind of help as a translator and reader of what the patient may
be communicating that he or she didn’t know they had been conveying. We don’t
disillusion the patient too quickly of his fantasies about the nature of reality, about
the nature of change, or about the nature of the relationship with the analyst.
For me, ideally, the framework of psychoanalysis is nearly always offered
with carefulness in a perverse way. This is embodied in the adventurousness
and unconventional nature of saying what comes to mind in the context of a
treatment. The European historian Tony Judt (2010) defined the edge and “edge
people” as “the place where countries, communities, allegiances, affinities, and
roots bump uncomfortably up against one another—where cosmopolitanism is
not so much an identity as the normal condition of life” (p2). The patient and
analyst as boundary artists are helping the patient to live on the edge of their
own internal cosmopolitanism, and there is no doubt that the capacity to live in
this place with another person is a privilege for both patient and analyst.
As Parsons (2007) has put it: “we need to be aware of our disturbance by the
process and the patient needs to feel our emotional availability” (p1194). Get-
ting lost in the wilderness at times is required.
Why refer to sexual misconduct with patients as “boundary

violation?”
For a number of years, I have been trying to figure out why the term boundary
violation bothers me. With all due respect to my esteemed colleagues who are
experts in the study of sexual misconduct, I want to think through why the recent
habit (dating circa 1990) of referring to sexual misconduct in psychoanalysis as
a “boundary violation” might be problematic. I will argue that since “bound-
aries” are fragile metaphoric constructions essential in our psychoanalytic work,
the tendency to concretize them in pragmatic forensic discourse undermines our
capacity to explore psychic phenomena. One might even say that by reducing the
metaphor of boundaries so insistently to a single behavioral referent—“sexual
boundary violations”– we “violate” another boundary that is constitutive of psy-
choanalysis itself: the implicit boundaries related to the concept of transference.
The problem is that in our moral pragmatic discourse we have created what
might be termed, to borrow a phrase from Bion, a false “constant conjunction”
between the term “boundary” and the term “violation”. This is not just an issue
of semantics. When the “boundary” metaphors that are implicit in our work are
transformed into a major piece of jargon in our lexicon, one that supposedly
designates precise behavioral entities and coordinates, something fundamental
about the psychoanalytic way of thinking is compromised and potentially lost
in confusion.
In the art of psychoanalytic work, psychical boundaries involve processes,
not things. Analytic work tries to gain purchase on the ways that patients and
analysts play in the virtual realm of psychic boundaries, including how these
boundaries are understood and misunderstood. The insistent and very concrete
references to behavioral boundaries in our discourse tend to obfuscate this vir-
tual dimension by fostering the impression that boundaries are literal and stable
entities. I chaff against this “category confusion” because while there is no such
thing as a psychic boundary, there is a line that should not be crossed with
reference to having actual sex with patients.
My wish is to wrest the term psychic boundary from its frequent companion,
“violation,” because it adds to already precarious and always shifting meta-
phors of psychic boundaries and psychic borders in clinical work. In a sense it
is the most general and vague way to describe these problems and is often
inaccurate as well, except at the most general level of description, one in which
all illegal actions of one person against another involve a “boundary” crossing
(e.g., murder or theft).
There is an insidious way that our language about psychic boundaries, jux-
taposed to sexual boundary violations, involves a taming of the radical
enterprise of psychoanalysis. The discursive shift of the essential, implicit

boundary concept to the explicit and concrete behavioral dimension reflects not
only the danger of sexual stimulation and intimacy in the analytic situation, but
anxiety for all of us about loss of control in general in the analytic enterprise.
The problematic aspects of referring to actual behavioral ethical violations as
boundary violation is in my view indicative of problems of technique and ana-
lytic sensibility that I explore.
It is important to keep in mind that even behavioral boundaries are fluid
constructs, no less so than—and always confluent with—psychic boundaries.

For example, the use of explicit sexual language in the psychoanalytic dialogue
is not necessarily “sexual harassment” of the patient though of course it may
become a form of enactment within the work. Yet with regard to the analyst’s
behavior, it is indeed possible and probably necessary to draw a very stark and
simple line beyond in which ethical misconduct is empirically defined for practical
purposes. The discourse of “sexual boundary violations” piggy-backs on this
practical, expedient definition of sexual misconduct, giving rise to the impres-
sion that psychic boundaries are also “clear and distinct.” In fact all human
boundaries, psychic and/or behavioral, are always negotiated, and always
shifting in the analytic relationship.
Sexual relationships with psychoanalytic patients are unethical. There are
many reasons that analysts engage in sexual relationships with patients, and
these have been well explored by psychoanalytic authors (e.g., Gabbard, 1994,
2008; Celenza & Gabbard, 2003; Celenza, 2007). However, in referring to
sexual activity with patients in terms of boundaries, thus importing pre-estab-
lished borders and false precision into the analytic situation, we minimize the
unique aspects of the treatment that we provide and we externalize elements of
our psychic responsibility as analysts.
When analysts have sex with patients, they are not operating within the basic
contract and set of ideals that mark psychoanalytic work—that psychic
boundaries will be discovered and understood through the analytic process. The
concept of sexual boundary violation jumps from this psychical exploration and
discovery of psychic boundary into inevitably moralistic and behavioral judg-
ments. These judgments are intrinsic to and essential to maintaining ethical
standards in the conduct of analytic work, but they do not involve the basic
work approach to explore psychic boundaries at the heart of the analytic
enterprise. Without this work, there can be no meaningful talk of psychic
“boundaries,” and so it is vital that this work not be conflated with pre-estab-
lished rules of ethical behavior.
A trope that may be familiar to some of you from comedy or advertising
related to the question of how many clowns could fit into a Volkswagen beetle.
The physics leads us to an inescapable answer that at some point we just can’t
fit one more clown into the car. My point is that the enormous and destructive
scale of sexual misconduct is better described by labeling language with
behavioral referents rather than a moniker that combines forensic violation and
the subtleties of analytic process.
I am concerned that the use of boundary as standardized jargon in the con-
text of sexual misconduct is part of a particular kind of distortion of what we
do and do not have control of in relation to psychic mechanisms and psychic
functioning. Aesthetics come into play because, in my view, the concept of
psychic boundary involves the workable artistic function of the patient and
analyst as boundary artists. The literal use of the term boundary to “theorize”
sexual misconduct unwittingly drains its implicit source in the radical, aesthetic
and artistic challenge of working in Freud’s “playground” of psychic bound-
aries. The literal concept of a violation of a boundary that is sexual compels
retreat from the underlying complexity inherent in any notion of boundaries in
psychic life, as I have been describing. If Freud and Klein taught us anything, it
is that in thinking about the concept of boundary, we have to begin with the
notion that a boundary is always rooted in a fantasy.
The fact that in psychoanalytic work we are talking about virtual realities,
fantasies and liminal phenomena is easily lost in the pragmatic language of
ethics discourse. I want to say in advance that I am going to take on what at
first glance appears to be a very small matter about the way in which we use
language, and I’m going to amplify it for discursive purposes. I will focus on
some particular words from my colleague Glen Gabbard, who has been at the
forefront of exploring what he refers to as the analyst’s ethical boundary vio-
lations. I do so in order to provide a critique of this usage. I do not mean to
minimize his significant contributions to understanding unethical behavior
among our colleagues. I suspect that he might agree with the point I want to
make, but our words matter, particularly since the notion of psychic boundaries
is so central to the art of psychoanalysis.
For example, in a discussion of Goldberg (2008), who questions the concept
of “boundary violation” from a somewhat different angle than me, Gabbard
(2008) makes the following intriguing statement: “Paradoxically, the boundaries
that we set up in the analytic setting are established so that both participants
have the possibility of crossing them psychologically.” He provides as examples
of boundary crossing: “familiar modes of crossing the semipermeable mem-
brane constructed by the analytic dyad, introjection, projective identification
and empathy” (p878).
I believe that Gabbard is trying here to distinguish between the use of
boundary as related to behavior versus uses of the term psychic boundary that
relate to unconscious mechanisms and fantasy. Psychic boundaries relate to the
intrinsic confusion of human communication about what is inside and outside
and what is self and other. He is referring to the basic concept of sexual absti-
nence as what allows us to do our work, an unassailably logical argument and,
in my view, an absolute prerequisite to analytic work.
Yet there is something that is subtly quite provocative about Gabbard’s
understanding of the analyst’s power in his description here. I think that I know
what he might intend to mean when he says that sexual abstinence is what
“allows” the patient and analyst to “cross boundaries psychologically.” I believe
that what he means to say is that we have the possibility of understanding these
psychic processes with the patient in analytic work. But what does the phrase
mean—that we “allow” to cross psychic boundaries expressed through uncon-
scious mechanisms of projective identification, identification, and empathy?
It is likely that Gabbard’s intention is to suggest that the creation of the
frame itself (that kind of boundary) allows us to notice, explore and make use
of processes of projective identification and empathy. But I focus on the way in

which he puts it because it expresses a problem that we as psychoanalysts
continually enact related to the borders of what we do and do not control in
the analytic arrangement. His phrasing implies that psychic phenomena such as
empathy, projective identification, or enactment are forms of boundary cross-
ing. I think that within an intersubjective view of psychology, it is very mis-
leading to think of them in this way.
In contrast to Gabbard’s formulation, I would say, alternatively, that pro-
jective identification exists as a need that humans have “as deep as hunger and
thirst” (Ogden, 2004, p173). Unless we begin with a notion that self and other
are clearly differentiated from the outset—a very dubious assumption—we
should assume that empathy and projective identification occur naturally.
Moreover, the psychic boundaries that we co-create with patients, or encounter,
will in all likelihood be artifacts of these very same processes of introjection,
empathy, and projective identification that the putative “analytic boundaries”
allegedly make possible.
Psychoanalysts set up rules about sexual abstinence in the analytic situation
to provide real and illusory experiences of safety, ideals held by professional
organizations that the analyst belongs to about the invasive procedure of psy-
choanalysis. These rules allow us to look at psychological processes that are not
really acknowledged in conventional discourse. Psychoanalysts simply construct
a situation that allows us to understand the embedded complexity of psychic
boundaries.
Conventional discourse enacts the processes of projective identification,
empathy, and identification. Humor is funny because we are putting things into
the other person that are fundamentally uncontainable related to aggression,
hypocrisy, longings, repulsion, shame, rage, and so on. Projective identification
and empathy, transference and countertransference are not reflections of our
invitation for boundary crossing in psychoanalysis. Instead, they reflect the
ways in which minds communicate in intersubjective patterns that in psycho-
analysis we try to fleetingly understand. These processes of human commu-
nication are generally not really acknowledged in conventional discourse, yet
they are the foundational principles upon which psychoanalysis works. For we
can’t understand what people are telling us that they don’t know they are tell-
ing us without our empathic capacities and attunement to projective identifica-
tion. What we do invite is an opportunity for patients to talk about whatever
comes to mind, to psychically shed their clothes, and to discuss things that we
are taught from childhood not to discuss with others. These processes are not
something that the analyst is involved in offering, controlling, or approving.
Instead, these processes are embedded in human communication. We do not
approve them or make them possible. We use them.
These messages to our patients about heightened expressiveness in the con-
text of behavioral restraint are, as Modell (1991) has described, paradoxical in
nature, and sexual abstinence helps therapists to cope with implicit paradox in
the structural arrangements of psychoanalysis. Paradox exists between the rule

of sexual abstinence in the framework of treatment and another boundary
between everyday life in which abstinence is not required, even if sometimes
advised depending on the social context. Describing our needs to cope with
paradoxical and impossibly complex elements of the analytic situation that we
don’t create allows for a clearer statement about the relationship between
sexual abstinence and psychic communication that we have no control over. As
I said earlier, I imagine that Gabbard would agree with this formulation, but I
draw attention to these words because these ways of thinking permeate all of
our analytic thinking and may enact ways that we try to control matters that
we have no control over in the context of our impossible profession.
Why did we ever go in the direction of referring to engaging in sex with
patients as a boundary violation? I actually see it as a form of abstraction and
defense on the part of the analytic community—a shying away from the very
specific ways that we are uniquely qualified to describe unethical sexual mis-
conduct. We use our strong capacities for formulations to describe the pathol-
ogy and regressive elements of our patients, but in describing our colleagues,
who deserve our compassion but not our blurry thinking, we offer obfuscation
and abstraction. By referring to unethical sexual conduct as a boundary viola-
tion, despite our collective and justified alarm with regard to sexual misconduct
and the need to protect patients from such actions, our vocabulary helps us to
unwittingly protect ourselves from our responsibility to offer more incisive
understandings. By incisive, I mean that calling it simply “sexual misconduct” is
considerably less mystifying.
By characterizing psychic phenomena such as projective identification as
crossings of boundaries set up by the analyst, or which only the analyst under-
stands, we are potentially involved in a particular kind of professional enact-
ment—the conscription of naturally occurring human communication patterns
into the service of the analyst’s sense of control and dominance. In other words,
we enact a kind of disavowed claim for control over things that we do not
control. So for example, aspects of relationships, analytic and otherwise, that
we are all submerged in become analytic techniques, as if the analyst is now
“using” these rather than submerged in them and trying to understand what is
happening. That both people are submerged in the process is not to say that
there is absolute mutuality or symmetry; I think that there is a great deal of
asymmetry in our roles, and presumably the analyst is in a better position than
the patient to make sense of what is happening. Bass (2001) has argued that
asymmetry in roles is relatively distinct from asymmetry of psychic experience
and that in his view this distinction is one of the important differences between
relational theory and the Independent tradition.
I suspect that these problems are even more pronounced when sexual mis-
conduct is involved in the discussion of boundary crossing. I think that it is safe
to say that analysts, like all human beings, are aroused, frightened and anxious
about their own sexuality and that of others. It is not by accident that this
unjustified conscription of technique about psychical boundaries to the power

and authority of the analyst is made by many of us, because I believe that it
unconsciously works to titrate the analyst’s anxiety about an area that, along
with death, is the most anxiety-producing area of work in psychoanalysis. It
seems to me that to be open to our patient’s sexuality and all elements of pro-
jective identification, including anger and wishes for merger, and the analyst’s
projective identification too, involves a recognition that we often, if not always,
ask our patients to submit to our own comfort levels and thresholds for listen-
ing to affect and fantasy.
We are all guilty of the conscription or sliding of elements of communication,
such as projective identification, into a technical framework (e.g., referring to it
as a matter of technique) that we call psychoanalysis. In other words, we are all
subject to developing descriptions of technique that involve subtle shifts to
safety in the service of control and reduction of anxiety.
We all fear the wilderness.
References
Bass, A. (2001) Mental structure, psychic process, and analytic relations. Psychoanalytic
Dialogues, 11: 717–725.
Bell, C. (1914). Art. London:Frederick A. Stokes Company Publishers.
Bion (1959). Attacks on linking. In Second Thoughts (pp93–109). London: Karnac, 1984.
Bolognini (2014). IPA Open Forum.
Bromberg, P.M. (2006) Awakening the Dreamer. Hillsdale: The Analytic Press.
Celenza, A. (2007). Sexual Boundary Violations: Therapeutic, Supervisory and Academic
Contexts. New York: Jason Aronson.
Celenza, A. & Gabbard, G. O. (2003). Analysts who commit sexual boundary
violations: A lost cause? Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 51:
617–636.
Chabon, M.(2009, July 16). Manhood for amateurs: The wilderness of childhood. New
York Review of Books, pp. 11–14.
Cooper, S. (2010). A Disturbance in the Field: Essays in Transference-Countertransference.
Diebenkorn, R. (1993). Notes to myself on beginning a painting. Unpublished
notes.
Freud, S. (1914). Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through. Standard Edition 12,
147–156.
Freud, S. (1915). Observations on transference-love. In J. Strachey (Ed. & Trans.), The

pp157–173). London: Hogarth Press.
Gabbard, G. O. (1994). Sexual excitement and countertransference love in the analyst.
Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 42: 1083–1106.
Gabbard, G. O. (2008). Boundaries, technique, and self-deception: A discussion of
Arnold Goldberg’s “Some limits of the boundary concept.” Psychoanalytic Quarterly,
77: 877–881.
Goldberg, A. (2008). Some limits of the boundary concept. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 77:
861–875.
Grossman, W. I. (1992). Hierarchies, boundaries and representation in the Freudian
model of mental organization. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association,
40, 27–62.
Judt, T. (2010). Edge People. New York Review of Books, pp1–3. February 23, 2010.
Keats, J. (1952). Letters (4th ed.) (M. B.. Forman, Ed.). London: Oxford University
Press.
Levine, H. (2013). Comparing field theories. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 23: 667–673.
McCaffery, M. (2012). An expanded interview with David Foster Wallace. In S. J. Burn
(Ed.), Conversations with David Foster Wallace. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.
Modell, A. H. (1991). The therapeutic relationship as paradoxical experience.
Nietzsche (1889). Twilight of the Idols. New York: Hackett Publishing Company.
Ogden, T. (2004). The analytic third: Implications for psychoanalytic theory and
Parat, C. J. (1976). À propos du contre-transfert [On countertransference]. Revue
Française de Psychanalyse, 40: 545–560.
Sillman, A. (2014). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston exhibition. Notes for painting: Me and
Ugly Mountain.
Chapter 9
The theorist as an unconscious

participant: Emerging and
unintended crossings in a
post-pluralistic psychoanalysis
This chapter is written in the spirit of trying to help psychoanalysts think more
about emerging and unintended crossings in the development of clinical theory
in a pluralistic psychoanalytic world. I will highlight how analysts are often
unwittingly communicating about common clinical problems in conceptual fra-
meworks and language that extend beyond his or her particular orientation. I
will try to address some of the particular characteristics that may give rise in
clinical situations to types of thinking that find resonance with a broad variety
of analysts.
In particular, I examine points of inflection in theory development which
arise from limitations in the theorist’s theory. In this sense what I am suggest-
ing in this chapter and linking to the rest of this book is that as theorists we are
hopefully working toward the depressive position, thinking and creating in the
face of incompleteness and limitation. I think of the worst kind of theory
development or utilization as that which takes each piece of clinical data and
fits it into existing theory. In contrast, the best theory development works
within a given model but is open to facing elements of incompleteness, limita-
tion, or even types of impasse in understanding clinical phenomena.
I explore clinical contributions that are written by analysts who are not put-
ting on offer an intended link to other analytic approaches. Instead, I will draw
attention to something that is emergent in the development of theory that is
likely to involve an unwitting reach and unintended linking. Put another way, I
have no stake in the question of whether we live in a productively pluralistic
world or a “mythically pluralistic” one (Green, 2005). I do, however, believe
that since particular analysts are reaching analysts outside their “parent” theo-
retical framework, it is interesting to think about some emergent properties that
these developments hold in common.
Given the breadth of theory being described here and some of these emergent
trends in solving common clinical problems, it is necessary for me to emphasize
that I am not proposing integrations of very separate and often incompatible
clinical theories. I am, however, suggesting that we are able to learn from
thinking about how we develop clinical theory, including very different types of
theory.
The theorist as an unconscious participant 149
In agreement with Canestri (2005), and as I have proposed earlier (Cooper,

2000; Cooper, 2007), I do not consider different theories of internal object
relations and conflict to be compatible at the level of clinical theory. However,
in the work of individual practitioners, the relationship between theory and
practice is not always as close as we may be taught, an idea suggested by both
Smith (2003) and Canestri (2005). This point was also emphasized much earlier
by Sandler (1983), who noted that the analyst at work is in the process of
creating constructions or partial constructions that account for the most useful
possible ways to work with specific patients. Thus, I would suggest that some
clinical theory, borne of adaptations to working with specific patients, may be
particularly amenable to linking with a broader array of analysts.
I am also describing emergent trends in how we read theories from outside
our parent theory. Some of the theorists whom I describe in this chapter are
particularly usable and applicable to a broad swath of analysts. The reason for
this applicability probably relates to how these authors are gifted at articulating
and formulating some common clinical problems in analytic work. How we
read, transform and utilize various technical suggestions and theoretical con-
cepts is also related to the elasticity of the concepts themselves (Sandler, 1983).
It is likely that there are also even regional differences in how much we
believe in the exercise of comparative psychoanalysis. For example, I have the
sense that in the United States, there has been an emergence of diverse models
of psychoanalytic theory, even focusing strictly on International Psycho-
analytical Association (IPA)-approved institutes. In turn, this multiplicity of
models may make the exercise of comparative psychoanalysis a more necessary,
more useful tool for developing our own theories of mind and technique as we
develop as analysts.
The emergent theory to which I refer works at a different level of discourse
than explicit attempts at comparative translation of psychoanalytic concepts.
The latter was essentially the task of the early phases of comparative psycho-
analysis and has been accomplished now for many years with regard to con-
cepts such as object relations and drive (e.g., Greenberg & Mitchell, 1983;
Sandler, 1983), defense (Cooper, 1989; Sandler, 1983), transference and coun-
tertransference (Kernberg, 1993), conflict (Hirsch, 1995; Smith, 2000), and epis-
temology (Mitchell, 1997; Schafer, 1983), among many other contributions.
In contrast, most of the theory that I will focus on here involves a clinical
level of discourse aimed at solving important common clinical problems within
a particular theoretical orientation. Each example of clinical theory in this
chapter involves the analyst at work, solving clinical problems and bumping up
against particular limitations leading to an expansion of his or her theory.
Leonard Bernstein (1973), in a series of lectures entitled “The Unanswered
Question,” referred to a point of inflection in the creative development in music
that grows out of a limitation in theory, one that facilitates musical invention.
Similarly, this point of inflection occurs in clinical psychoanalytic theory that
generates new observations and suggestions in clinical technique.
150 The theorist as an unconscious participant
I would conjecture that the theorists whom I will discuss are not explicitly
aware that they are suggesting overarching descriptions of clinical processes
that are usable in a variety of different models. For example, some of the work
of Steiner (1994) and Feldman (1997) that I discuss here is still well understood
as part of a continuing extension of contemporary Kleinian theory. Yet, these
are examples of clinical theory that render them especially usable and accessible
to a wide variety of analysts.
Instead, my focus here is on the unintended broad implications of clinical
observations to all analysts. While the intent and concerns of these clinical
contributions are clearly not fundamentally ecumenical, I will suggest that we
are unwittingly developing a form of clinical theory that extends the reach of
particular orientations. I refer to this phase of analytic thinking as post-plural-
ism. I am not suggesting that we will eventually end up with a new clinical
theory; rather, what is occurring in psychoanalysis are unintended crossings and
overlap in our thinking that are interesting and may actually be helpful to think
about. Hopefully, it will be useful for future students who have been psycho-
analytically trained with a number of different clinical models to think about.
Perhaps an apt metaphor for what I am trying to describe at the level of
meta-theory—theory about theory—is that of Strange Attractor Theory in
physics. Strange attractors are points of disequilibrium and transformation in
complex dynamic systems. An attractor is a set towards which a variable,
moving according to the dictates of a dynamical system, evolves over time. That
is, points that get close enough to the attractor remain close even if slightly
disturbed. Systems change or become reconstituted in new forms as a result of
attractors. I will try to elaborate some strange attractors that may be forming
new kinds of assembly within our body of psychoanalytic theory.
Considering the emergent reach of clinical theories

We in the United States are in the aftermath of the creation and popularization
of co-existing, diverse theories of clinical psychoanalysis. In the UK, since the
publication of Sandler’s (1983) examination of how basic psychoanalytic con-
cepts are used in varying ways in different theories, and in the United States,
since the publication of Greenberg and Mitchell’s (1983), Object Relations in
Psychoanalytic Theory, Schafer’s (1983) pioneering exercise in comparing var-
ious version of psychic reality, and Kernberg’s (1993) examination of con-
vergent and divergent trends in the use of transference and countertransference,
we have created a mode of comparative thinking that has sought to address the
emergence of various theories of psychoanalysis.
In the United States, transference, defense, conflict, states of mind, self-states,
affect, interaction, epistemology and the unconscious are variously defined, and
technical approaches also vary from model to model. Analysts as diverse as
Ogden, Greenberg, LaFarge, Wilson, Modell, Kernberg, Kris, Poland, Chused,
Balsam, Spezzano and Cooper to some extent display a mode of psychoanalytic
writing that is infused thinking about the many surfaces that matter to us most
as psychoanalysts. This does not mean that these authors don’t hold to a par-
ticular clinical theory of analytic work of one kind or another. There are,
however, many examples of theory in the work of these American authors that
include elements of Independent tradition and ego psychology approaches,
Kleinian and interpersonal approaches, Kleinian and Independent approaches,
Kleinian and relational approaches, and relational and ego psychology
approaches.
Sandler (1983) pointed out that a significant dimension of how we think

comparatively is not only related to the diversity of theories. He suggested sev-
eral other dimensions, including how we think about the elasticity of concepts
within theory and how we take into account various types of disjunction
between theory and how analysts practice the theory that they hold.
We are just beginning to witness the implications of 30 years of pluralism
because a few generations of young analysts have now been “raised,” so to
speak, in this multi-linguistic framework. Of course, some would argue that the
interpenetration of models is problematic because it might diffuse the central
contributions from various models. While a very interesting question and a
matter of reasonable concern, it is not addressed in this chapter since I am not
so much arguing for the value of a pluralistic orientation. Instead, I am
describing some epiphenomena related to the emergence of theoretical pluralism
particularly in the United States and, perhaps it should be said, in the American
reading of Kleinian and Independent tradition analysts.
It is my sense that for analysts who read more strictly within their particular
orientation, it might make it more difficult to estimate the influence of the
variety of approaches that exist now in psychoanalysis (e.g., Margulies, 2014).
It might also be easy to minimize some of the pathways and links that seem
visible to readers of multiple theories of psychoanalysis. An analogy might exist
in relation to children who learn how to speak more than one language—say,
two or three. They are familiar with not only different spoken languages, but
sometimes some common linguistic features of these languages. It is also true,
however, that they may be prone to problems or more misinterpretations of
linguistic phrasings than others who are steeped in one language.
The interpenetration of clinical ideas is hardly a new phenomenon of psy-
choanalytic theorizing. For example, Gill’s (1976) emphasis in the United States
of the ubiquitous presence of transference and introduction of early interpreta-
tion of transference had long been present among Kleinian analysts in the UK,
Europe and South America. Some of the excitement of American analysts about
Gill’s clinical contribution also pointed to the provincialism of American psy-
choanalysts who at that time were not reading contemporary Kleinian writing
as frequently as is now the case.
For a moment, as an example, consider how the concept of projective
identification, one of the central elements of psychoanalytic theory, was “inter-
personalized” beginning in the 1970s in ways that have influenced some
contemporary Kleinian theory. Contemporary Kleinian theorists, even those

most interested in some elements of the analyst’s participation and inter-
personal influence (e.g., Feldman, 1997), retain a primary view of the uncon-
scious as a theory of unconscious internal object relations in dynamic interplay
with current interpersonal experience (Ogden, 1979). From this perspective, the
analysis of internal object relations explores the relationship between internal
objects and the ways in which the patient resists altering these unconscious
internal object relations in the face of current experience.
While definitions of projective identification were broadened to include

“induction” of the analyst (Ogden, 1979), fundamental elements of object rela-
tions theory were preserved. The concept of projective identification found its
way to other schools of psychoanalysis for them to consider, critique, and
incorporate into some of their own fundamental perspectives about
psychoanalysis.
I would like to suggest that in looking at contributions from a variety of
psychoanalytic approaches including contemporary Kleinian, ego-psychological,
Independent tradition and relational, we see a kind of emergent theory that may
be evolving from the context of pluralistic approaches to psychoanalytic work. I
refer to clinical theory that extends to broad groups of analysts, offering not a
new body of technique or a systematic metapsychology but instead some over-
arching clinical and technical principles that the analyst will consider in the
application of his particular model.
This theory is nearly always embedded within a particular clinical orienta-
tion, such as ego psychology, Bionian, Kleinian, Freudian, Independent tradi-
tion or interpersonal theory of psychoanalysis, but it offers something that is
more likely to extend beyond practitioners of that particular, if you will, parent
orientation. It is a kind of theory that provides links or a bridge to outside
theories, not through the intention of the writer but through the reader who
imposes his own frame of reference.
The type of clinical contributions that I describe sometimes grows out of
limitations in one’s own technique or theory but only sometimes reflects dis-
cernible influence by observations from outside one’s own orientation (e.g.,
Greenberg, 1995; Kris, 1990). I would speculate that observations generated by
this theory are also often quite likely to be subsequently used by clinicians from
outside one’s own theoretical orientation. One could argue that some versions
of this theory that link to other theory already reflect the use of hybrid con-
cepts. It may be that these hybrid concepts and their development allow for
further application to analysts from a wide variety of theoretical orientations.
Fundamentally, clinical theory that offers these links to other approaches is a
pragmatic response to clinical problems. It is an emergent type of theorizing
that contains fundamental characteristics of its parent theory while adding new
elements that were not intrinsic to its parent theory.
In other words, in the wake of a pluralistic analytic world, we may be
developing a kind of border language that transcends particular ways of seeing,
in order to speak to analysts’ broader clinical and theoretical concerns. This

type of theory may facilitate the ways in which analysts across orientations read
and communicate about their clinical findings in the context of some common
clinical problems.
In order to illustrate more about what I mean by this kind of clinical theory,
I provide five brief examples. These examples involve clinical/technical sugges-
tions that are steeped in a particular orientation and way of thinking, but each
has qualities that make it especially accessible to others from outside that par-
ticular orientation. In fact, in some examples, the authors themselves are bor-
rowing from other theorists and using the original author’s contributions in
unique ways, creatively applied to their own theory. I have chosen four exam-
ples within the first 20 years of the emergence of theoretical pluralism and one
more recent example. I will then discuss a few broader examples of this kind of
theoretical development. Each of these examples of theory is quite clinically
rich, and I will do an injustice to this richness for the purposes of conveying
something about how these developments represent qualities about these clinical
contributions that have resonance for a broad group of analysts.
Greenberg’s notion of the interactive matrix

Greenberg’s (1995) description of the interactive matrix is a good example of
clinical bridge theory because it suggests elements of what goes on between
patient and analyst that extend beyond a few particular models of psycho-
analytic theory. To suggest that his delineation of this concept transcends his
particular theory doesn’t mean that it isn’t easy to see elements of interpersonal
theory and ego psychology in his work. It simply means that there is a spirit of
clinical observation that is easy to apply to virtually any psychoanalytic orien-
tation. We are offered a comment on blind spots for all analysts.
Greenberg suggests the construct, the interactive matrix, to capture the atti-
tudes, preferences and beliefs that exist in each clinical dyad. Through the
interactive matrix concept, we can identify and characterize elements of fear,
wish, fantasy and belief that are the building blocks of creating meaning with
patients in analytic work. His notion of the interactive matrix puts a name to
the processes that Mitchell (1991) was also exploring in his elaboration of how a
dyad comes to understand what are needs and wishes expressed by the analyst.
Mitchell suggested that a substantial part of what leads particular analysts to
think of some phenomena as a “need” or “wish” will relate to the particular
kinds of personality of the analyst as well as what point in the process of analytic
engagement has been reached. For example, an analyst might listen to particular
phenomena at one point in analysis as related to need while at another as wish.
Greenberg is particularly interested in the congruence and difference between
patient and analyst in their beliefs and wishes in terms of what is made avail-
able for interpretation. He suggests that the analyst is far less likely to perceive
unconscious meaning including defense if the patient’s psychological beliefs in
particular areas overlap with those of the analyst’s psychology. Greenberg pro-
posed that in each clinical dyad, what is seen by the analyst and interpreted will
vary in accordance with the particular character structures of the patient and
analyst.
Since analytic dyads differ enormously in their hopes, beliefs and general
sensibility, Greenberg provides an overarching concept to describe the process
by which each analytic dyad will invest meaning. Greenberg’s influences are
far-ranging and reflect strong elements of both interpersonal theory and ego
psychology. As you will see, in the next section of this chapter, Feldman (1997),
arguing from a contemporary Kleinian perspective, comes to very similar conclu-
sions to those of Greenberg about the importance of intrapsychic/intersubjective
realities within the analytic dyad that, in turn, contribute to what is selectively
perceived and taken up with the analyst.
Greenberg asserts in his paper that there is no longer such a thing as received
technique, a point that can be argued endlessly on its merits and limitations. In
my view, there are received boundaries of technique. We all work within par-
ticular kinds of frameworks that help us understand mind, unconscious process,
affective states, defenses and the like. I believe that a focus on the unconscious,
transference and the inclusion in any set of technical choices related to interpreta-
tion, however defined or focused, represents essential elements of any clinical
theory of technique that could be usefully referred to as “psychoanalytic.”
Greenberg’s point is that it is our unique sensibility as analysts with each
unique patient that influences our technical choices. Seen from this perspective,
theory is like a loose assembly or scaffolding that we select and employ. While
this perspective doesn’t advocate prescriptive technique, it doesn’t eschew an
approach that values and considers our technical choices. It is more in line with
Eisenhower’s dictum regarding battle: “Plans are useless, but planning is indis-
pensable.” What is most important in relation to the current discussion is that
his notion of the interactive matrix offers a window on some overarching ele-
ments of clinical sensibility that in my view are applicable to many analysts
across orientations.
Michael Feldman’s notion of the analyst’s involvement in the

process of projective identification
Feldman (1997) highlighted a few clinical features of projective identification
that focus on the patient’s attempt to communicate a fantasy of an object rela-
tionship with propensities for action. He emphasized that the patient is pro-
jecting not only affects, but also particular kinds of relationships and that the
patient feels conflict to the extent that the analytic situation is not similar to
those earlier and familiar experiences. The analyst is pulled into scenarios in
which there is a greater relationship or correspondence to particular fantasies.
Feldman, not unlike Greenberg (1995), is interested in some vexing situations
in which it is difficult for the analyst to discern that he is pulled into particular
kinds of action. Feldman suggests that it is especially difficult when there is

congruity between the behavior pulled from within these internalized fantasies
and the analyst’s psychology and history. This can lead to blind spots in the
analyst’s vision. Collusive arrangements between analyst and patient develop in
which these fantasies fly under the radar and are sometimes not addressed,
particularly because these projected fantasies usually defend against other more
disturbing fantasies and affects.
I believe that Feldman is focusing on some clinical situations that have great
applicability across models of psychoanalysis. First, many patients create refuge

in symmetry and minimization of differences between the patient and analyst, a
point highlighted beautifully by O’Shaughnessy (1992). There is often an
unconscious fantasy of similarity that partly allows the patient and sometimes
the analyst to avoid strong feelings, including erotic and aggressive feelings.
There is also a common tendency among analysts to unconsciously avoid the
patient’s anxieties by unconsciously functioning in ways that the patient
apparently requests or requires. Many patients want to avoid experiences of
asymmetry in order to minimize longings, anger, and envy, and instead seek
refuge in the status quo—a fantasy of similarity and relative equilibrium.
Even more important is that Feldman’s observations focus on enactments
that are often more subtle than those in our literature. He is describing enact-
ments that may involve the analyst’s daily dissociation or minimization of the
patient’s longings and anger. In contrast, much of the psychoanalytic literature
across orientations has focused on much more dramatic forms of enactment and
impasse that those described by Feldman.
Most analysts would agree, albeit with varying concepts and terminology,
that when the internalized object relations and defensive structures of the
patient correspond to or exist in complementary relation to the analyst’s inter-
nal objects and defensive structures, it is easy to overlook psychic meaning. In
my view, it is difficult to conceive of any psychoanalytic approach that would
prevent against this possibility. The particular unintended bridge that is offered
by Feldman relates to a strong commitment to understanding the patient’s
internalized world while examining the pulls and influences that the analyst
may experience and participate in enacting with the patient. Thus Feldman’s
observations fit into the type of clinical theorizing that I am trying to emphasize
here. Like Greenberg, Feldman is also making clinical observations that grow
out of his particular orientation but that are particularly usable and accessible
to a wide variety of analysts.
Steiner’s view of analyst-centered and patient-centered

interventions
Steiner (1994) drew our attention to the crucial distinctions between the
patient’s need to understand versus the patient’s need to be understood. He
suggested that for some patients with a strong need to retreat and withdraw,
patient-centered interpretations—those that focus on a particular motive or

affect that the patient has communicated—may be experienced as particularly
persecutory, shaming, or intrusive. The patient experiences the analyst as failing
to contain the patient’s anxiety, particularly if the analyst persists in interpret-
ing or explaining to the patient what he is thinking or feeling. Essentially, the
patient feels that the analyst is putting or pushing projected elements in the
patient’s communications back into him.
In contrast to patient-centered interpretations, analyst-centered interpreta-
tions tend to focus on the patient’s interest in what is going on in the analyst’s
mind about what the patient is communicating. Steiner suggests that analyst-
centered interpretations are more concerned with the patient’s sense of being
understood rather than conveying understanding. Steiner is the first to suggest
that sometimes these distinctions are less schematic than he proposes. He does
provide us with an extremely useful scaffolding for talking about the patient’s
experience of interpretation.
Part of the reason that Steiner’s observations about analyst-centered and
patient-centered comments are of such great clinical value and are referred to so
frequently in the psychoanalytic literature at large (including outside the Klei-
nian literature) is that his observations speak to referent points that reflect
common clinical problems. For example, we all work with patients for whom
the interpretation of internal life or the recognition of the other is so painful
that they disintegrate, withdraw, get angry, suspicious or attack. All analysts
deal with empathic failure on a daily basis. Similarly, analysts less interested in
the metapsychology and developmental formulations of self-psychology never-
theless found value in the areas of empathic rupture that it detailed. All analysts
have to deal with the notion of resistance on the part of the patient to under-
standing elements of their projections of internal object relations. We also have
to deal with the related problem of how to minimize shame (Kohut, 1979; Kris,
1990; Morrison, 1984, 2008) as we help the patient to understand what he is
expressing that he didn’t realize he was expressing. Naturally, much of these
accounts help the analyst in detecting shame in circumstances when its occur-
rence is often inevitable.
Related to Steiner’s emphasis on the patient’s experience of interpretation is a
long history of analysts influenced by both Kleinian and ego psychology who
had elaborated our understanding of the patient’s experience of interpretation.
Much of Joseph’s work (e.g., Joseph 1985) explored the patient’s relationship to
interpretation both with regard to experience and meaning. These experiences
were also related to her belief that the analyst is inevitably drawn into playing a
role in the patient’s fantasy and that observing this role can shed light on the
patient’s habitual style of object relationships. In later work, Steiner (2008)
elaborated these forms of enactment, a terrain well-covered by a number of
analysts (e.g., Feldman, 1997; O’Shaughnessy, 1992).
In the United States, partly in response to Winnicott’s elaboration of the
experiential dimensions of interpretation, Modell (1976) drew attention to the
holding elements of interpretation as well as the actual content of interpreta-

tion. Morrison’s (1984) work on shame drew our attention to the relatively less
emphasized importance of shame in contrast to the pervasive elaboration of
unconscious guilt in psychic functioning. Slochower (1996), Benjamin (2004),
and Cooper (2010) have pointed out not only how our interpretations are
experienced, but also how in various ways our modes of interpretation enact
particular kinds of clinical problems, including the enactment of internalized
object relations.
Thus Steiner’s contributions to differentiating types of interpretation reflect a

variety of embedded clinical foci related to the meaning and experience of
interpretation from a large group of analysts from outside a Kleinian orienta-
tion. These phenomena included the patient’s experience of shame, ways in
which interpretation enacts elements of internalized object relations, and ways
that interpretations succeed and fail to contain what is being expressed in var-
ious clinical approaches to interpretation. His contribution involves an over-
arching clinical sensibility regarding universal problems in communicating to
patients. In turn, he provides a technical approach that resonates with many
analysts who understand the value of attending to the impact of interpretation.
Kris’s notion of functional neutrality

In a long series of papers, Kris (e.g., Kris, 1982, 1985, 1990) explored the con-
cept of the analyst’s stance, particularly from the viewpoint of the method of
free association. He has tried to explore what promotes freedom of association,
including understanding various kinds of resistances and the analyst’s position
of neutrality in relationship to these forms of resistance. Kris’s aim is to provide
a methodological approach to helping patients understand more what limits
their capacities for association. These limits involve unconscious restrictions,
resistance that Kris distinguishes from conscious restrictions on free
association.
Kris illuminates how unconscious self-criticism is recognized by its con-
sequences, including painful affects, states of deprivation and interruptions in
the process of free association. For example, the pleasurable experience of free
association may cause some patients to interrupt the process in order to answer
to unconscious self-reproach.
Kris suggests that “an affirmative attitude” to patients with prominent fea-
tures of punitive unconscious self-criticism is required. From his point of view,
the use of this affirmative attitude helps to provide functional neutrality—that
is, neutrality partly defined by the patient’s experience of the analyst rather than
an externally described viewpoint of neutrality. Kris is explicit about the ways
that he was influenced by Kohut’s more affirmative stance toward patients who
suffer from intense self-criticism, shame, and unconscious guilt, despite the fact
that he rejects elements of Kohut’s developmental and meta-psychological con-
tributions. He is also likely implicitly responding to Kohut’s emphasis on the
patient’s experience of all of the analyst’s verbalized interventions as well as his

silence as factors that may be at play in determinations of the analyst’s neu-
trality. Kris’s formulations about the concept of punitive unconscious self-cri-
ticism integrate elements of Kohut’s stance of an affirmative attitude without
abandoning either the concepts of unconscious conflict and unconscious guilt.
It is interesting to think about the overlapping clinical problems that moti-
vated Kris (1990) from an ego-psychological direction and Steiner (1994) from a
contemporary Kleinian orientation. Each was concerned with the unin-
tentionally hurtful impact that their interventions would have upon the patient.
For example, Kris points out how there are instances when we take up the
patient’s guilt and the patient experiences the interpretation as an assertion that
he or she has something to feel guilty about. This persecutory dimension to the
experience of interpretation is very similar to that which Steiner directed his
concern about the hazards of patient-centered interpretations.
Like Steiner’s concerns, Kris’s methodological contribution contains a
number of the same embedded clinical concerns regarding the patient’s experi-
ence of the analyst. This concern is one that bridges analysts from a variety of
orientations and illuminates how the analyst functions in assessing the impact
of his interpretations across orientations. At the same time, his observations are
well embedded in a clinical theory that focuses on his longstanding interests in
two types of conflict, divergent and convergent, as well as punitive unconscious
self-criticism.
Spezzano’s notion of a home for the mind

A more recent version of clinical theory that is easily usable to analysts from a
variety of orientations is Spezzano’s (2007) elaboration of the relationship
between the analyst’s mind as a container and therapeutic action. He discusses
how analytic change is facilitated through the patient’s experience of the ana-
lyst’s mind as a place within which the patient exists as an internal object.
Spezzano tries to differentiate this experience of the analyst as not entirely
explained by the analyst’s capacities to contain the anxieties or projected object
relations on to the analyst. He wants to make a claim that there are many ways
that interpretations convey to the patient the ways that the analyst holds the
patient’s inner life as an internal object. This is overlapping but not entirely
synonymous with another part of therapeutic action—the patient’s experience
of how he is held in mind by the analyst (Fonagy, 1996).
Of course, Spezzano is not the first analyst to emphasize the patient’s
experience of the analyst as an “analytic object” (Ogden, 1979). His metaphor
of a home for the mind, though, brings patient and analyst into some of the
most intimate and highly personal qualities of the analyst that are involved in
the patient’s trust of the analyst’s mind in understanding his own mind. Nor is
he the first to think of analysis as a home for the mind of the patient in the
mind of the analyst; Money-Kyrle (1968) used the metaphor of the patient
establishing a “psychic base” within the analytic setting. I would suggest that
there is a particular kind of “personalization” or humanization of the concept
of analytic object that is offered by Spezzano, a kind of bridge, as it were,
between Kleinian and relational perspectives related to how the analyst helps
the patient to understand his mind.
Spezzano provides several examples from the work of Mitchell (1997, 2000)
and Steiner (1994) about how the patient’s internal object representation of self-
and-analyst will reflect the patient’s imagining of a self-and-analyst living in the
mind of the analyst. This image in the mind of the patient is partly a fantasy
(although grounded in actual experiences within the transference-counter-
transference situation) about the patient’s fantasy of analyst-and-patient. Spez-
zano argues that for interpretations to be mutative, the patient’s fantasy must
be one in which the analyst’s mind is a free mind. In identification with the
analyst’s free mind, the patient can imagine taking in interpretations because
they are not experienced as fixed or controlling. If the analyst’s mind is fanta-
sied and experienced as a free mind, then what is offered is something that
allows interpretive play (e.g., Winnicott, 1971).
Patients grant us permission to interpret what is in their mind and for us to
tell them how we understand them in our own minds. In so doing, they give us
special authority to try to show them how they dissemble and how they com-
municate things that they are not aware of communicating. We act on the pri-
vilege given to us by the patient that we have a special place inside their mind,
and as Spezzano (2007) puts it, “we show evidence of the insidious way in
which psychoanalysis becomes a shared home for the mind” (p1563). There is
much responsibility for the analyst in introducing the patient to how he or she
is held in the analyst’s mind. LaFarge (2004, 2008) has written of some patients
who struggle with a nearly pure psychic culture of relying on the mind of the
other to know their own mind.
I would suggest that Spezzano offers a version of clinical theory here that
obviously crosses over many borders in clinical theory. The language and con-
cepts offer a special brand of object relations theory and relational theory. For
example, the patient as an internal object for the analyst combines elements of a
two-person model but retains fundamental tenets of object relations theory
because there is a conceptualization of the patient’s mind as separate from the
analyst’s mind.
Consider ways that Spezzano’s notion of a home for the mind might be
applied to Ogden’s (1994) interesting work on interpretive action. Ogden sug-
gested that at particular points of impasse, the analyst might use forms of
action (other than verbally symbolic speech) to convey to the analysand specific
aspects of the analyst’s understanding of the transference-countertransference
that cannot at that juncture in the analysis be conveyed by the semantic content
of words alone. Applying Spezzano’s contribution to understanding Ogden’s
interpretive action might suggest that the patient, at these times, experiences the
analyst’s mind as helpless, stuck or rendered useless. Alternatively, the patient
might experience the analyst’s mind as capable of imaginative potential in these

circumstances.
Some broader examples of clinical contributions in the United

States
Many other examples of clinical contributions with broad appeal to a variety of
analysts have emerged in recent years from a variety of places. Parsons’s (2006)
discussion of the analyst’s countertransference to the analytic process is a par-

ticularly useful version of this phenomenon. Once again, Parsons’s paper is
embedded within his unique clinical sensibility, but there is a kind of unwitting
reach toward analysts of all persuasions to consider our own feelings toward
psychoanalysis as an object. While it is quite difficult to parse our counter-
transference to a particular patient from our countertransference to the psy-
choanalytic process, Parsons develops an extremely cogent argument about the
value in trying to do so. I have suggested (Cooper, 2010) that in fact we have
multiple varieties of object relations to the psychoanalytic process.
In the United States, a number of broad clinical contributions to psycho-
analysis overlap with what I am referring to here as clinical bridge theory.
Modell’s (1976) emphasis on the holding elements of interpretation was an
example of a response to explanations of interpretation that had valorized the
accuracy and content of interpretation to the exclusion of the affective experi-
ences of containment. Here, clearly Modell’s appreciation of Klein, Bion and
Winnicott allowed him to bring something to American psychoanalysis that
was not being emphasized in formulations about therapeutic action by ego
psychologists at the time. Modell was seeking to emphasize elements of object
relationship in the interpretive elements of analytic process. He was suggesting
that interpretations contain the patient’s affect and communicate the analyst’s
affective participation in ways that were not as appreciated by American ana-
lysts as by their European and South American counterparts at the time.
Gill’s (1983) expanded definition of transference in the United States to
include the patient’s experience of both the analytic relationship and his con-
scious and unconscious allusions to his experience was another example of
clinical theory with broad implications to a variety of analysts. His revised
conceptualization of transference was influenced in some ways by his explicitly
stated growing interest in interpersonal theory, especially as reflected by his
new focus on the analyst’s unintended influence on the patient. He believed that
analysts benefited from listening to the patient’s unconscious allusions to his
experience of the analytic relationship, a matter of longstanding interest to
Kleinian analysts but not receiving much attention in the United States at the
time of Gill’s work.
I think that it is fair to say that American analysts from various theoretical
persuasions were increasingly alerted to the patient’s allusions to the transfer-
ence in different ways as a result of some of Gill’s work. Despite the
longstanding belief by Kleinians that transference begins at the outset of ana-

lytic work, it is likely that many American analysts were more influenced by
Gill’s (1976) suggestions about the value of early interpretation of transference
partly due to his incorporating more of the patient’s conscious experiences of
the analyst—if transference was more detectable through the patient’s early and
constant direct and indirect allusions to his experience of it, then it didn’t
necessarily take as long to hypothesize about or determine the nature of trans-
ference as had previously been believed.
Gill’s technical shifts in listening to the patient’s allusions to the transference

also coincided with an increased attention and appreciation for the patient’s
plausible view of reality (e.g., Hoffman, 1983). Thus embedded in his slightly
different way of thinking about transference is a view of the shifting sands
regarding epistemology in the clinical setting.
Each of these changes in ways of looking at transference in many ways
offered some bridges or overarching considerations that extended to analysts
from several different schools of thought within the United States. For example,
Gill’s ideas may have offered confirmation to a variety of analysts within the
United States who had already seen early signs in analytic work of patients’
meaningful allusions to transference. As a result of his contributions, there was
likely some methodological shift toward considering this axis of transference as
part of a more general epistemological shift in the clinical situation.
In fact, since Gill was “in transition” (Gill, 1994) between ego psychology
and interpersonal theory (actually the burgeoning elements of what became
known as conflict-relational theory), it would be hard to link these clinical ideas
about transference to any particular clinical theory. Instead, Gill was high-
lighting (for American psychoanalysts, in particular, who had not been as
influenced by Kleinian theories’ focus on the ubiquity of transference) that
transference might be usefully considered to include experiential elements along
with inferences about unconscious processes and that it might be alluded to
quite early in the analytic process.
Another significant contribution to elements of clinical bridge theory was the
social-constructivist axis developed by Hoffman (1991). For Hoffman, in the
social-constructivist model, there is a dialectical movement between the techni-
cal and personal. He suggests that there is no interpretive position that trans-
cends the analyst’s own subjectivity or personal participation. The
constructivist axis, particularly in the United States, whether it is that offered
by Schafer (1983) or Hoffman, has affected many models of psychoanalytic
epistemology in the clinical situation.
Hoffman’s social-constructivism translated into elements of what I later
termed “interpretive fallibility” (Cooper, 1996), applicable to all models of
analysis. The concept of interpretive fallibility was to draw our attention to the
way that analysts think about their own certainty and uncertainty across
whatever their psychoanalytic model of mind and clinical work. I examined the
hypothetical nature of interpretation, an axis that was incorporated into models
of analysis as diverse as Wolf’s (1986) work within self-psychology and Scha-

fer’s (1983, 1985a, 1985b) ego-psychological theory.
Interestingly, while Hoffman’s emphasis on the constructivist axis is applic-
able to a great deal of psychoanalytic theory, in my view his attempt to elabo-
rate some technical implications of his approach fall into quite narrow
applications of technique, albeit a technical approach issued with suspicion
about technical rationality as an ideal. Hoffman suggests that given the con-
tinuous stream of associations, transference and countertransference, only a
very small portion of that stream may be selected. He suggests that just as the
analyst will see elements of things that the patient resists, the patient too will
observe elements of the analyst’s resistance. He states that one of the practical
implications of this observation is that he believes in the “special interest” that
the analyst is encouraged to take in the patient’s conscious and unconscious
interpretations of the analyst’s influence.
The fact that he privileges these observations suggests a more narrow appli-
cation of his contributions. Many analysts from many different orientations
who find the constructivist axis a useful lens on the analytic situation wouldn’t
privilege this mode of inquiry, suggesting that his contribution has less breadth
with regard to his technical suggestions than some of the other models that I
have explored here. One could argue, for example, that the meaning of tracking
these perceptions down might make for a stilted analytic relationship, an intel-
lectualized relationship, a kind of concrete approach to the patient’s fantasy and
the like. For patients who live in the paranoid-schizoid position, this kind of
focus might be terribly unsettling and too often experienced as the analyst’s fail-
ure for containment. For others, this “special” interest might signify elements of
parental narcissistic enactment, while still other patients might experience the
analyst’s focus on the impact of his interpretations as an attempt to ingratiate
himself to the patient. No doubt, Hoffman would suggest that the analyst’s
attention to the patient’s experience of interpretation is what matters most, but
in my opinion, it is too often problematic to privilege his technical focus.
Some clinical and educational implications

Clinical contributions that reach a variety of analysts seem to grow out of
inflection points organized around particular clinical problems and contexts. In
particular, they relate to limitations in technique, such as the unintended con-
sequence of interpretation (e.g., Steiner and Kris) or the failure of the analyst to
see patterns of defense and object relations that are congruent with those of the
analysts (e.g., Feldman and Greenberg). It is through some of these common,
pragmatic technical contexts that there is a usable elaboration of technique for
analysts from a variety of theoretical and clinical influences.
Each analyst provides something of his or her own translation of his theory
as she attempts to reconcile theory with application. Canestri (2003) and
Canestri et al. (2006) define theory through the premise that psychoanalytic
practice is the sum of public theory-based thinking, private theoretical thinking,

and the interaction of private and explicit thinking about theory. Smith (2003)
also suggested that the relationship between theory and practice is not always
as close as we infer or as is taught in psychoanalytic institutes. In fact, Freud
(1915), in a letter to Ferenczi, wrote: “I consider that one should not make
theories. They should arrive unexpectedly in your house, like a stranger one
hasn’t invited” (p137). These theorists all emphasize that sometimes what we
do to solve clinical problems is embedded in our theory but is not always con-
sciously emanating from a theoretical premise but that rather the opposite may
be equally true.
Zimmer (2014) also makes the point in distinguishing between two kinds of
thinking:
One that occurs in the clinical situation and one that occurs in writing
about clinical theory. These two types of thinking reciprocally inform each
other, and either form of thinking is impoverished by its lack of access to
the other. They are responses to different demands—the former to the
demands of the clinical situation to respond to multiple phenomena occur-
ring simultaneously and to make an intervention in the moment which is
useful in any of a number of ways—and the latter to the demands of formal
intellectual discourse selecting out a single phenomenon and, often, con-
sidering that phenomenon through the lens of a single theoretical perspective
and describing it with that perspective’s particular vocabulary.
Zimmer is suggesting, and I agree, that in the clinical contributions discussed

here, we are likely looking at more “clinical-situation thinking” than what he
refers to as “formal-discourse” thinking.
For example, for Steiner (1993), the technical challenge he underscored is to
find an appropriate balance of patient-centered and analyst-centered interpretations.
There are pitfalls on either side. A patient who is prone to feel persecuted or
shamed will feel overwhelmed with patient-centered interpretations or too many
of them. On the other side, a patient may feel that an analyst who makes analyst-
centered interpretations is alluding to himself for underlying narcissistic reasons.
Steiner’s work reflected how Kleinian theory came to some inflection point in
its own intrinsic development about addressing interpretive problems of unin-
tended threat to patients, including narcissistic regression and paranoid anxieties.
Undoubtedly, these were problems that had been noted by analysts for years. For
example, Steiner’s work constitutes a further development of Joseph’s work
about the “difficult to reach patient,” the notion of the “total transference,”
and, in general, the Kleinian emphasis on the patient’s relationship to interpreta-
tion that, in turn, grew out of their work and Bion’s work on the implications of
failures of symbolization within the analytic situation.
Steiner’s contribution was not only technical. It was likely helpful to the
extent that it provided a clear way to formulate technical adjustments that
talented analysts had likely long been making. To the extent that his contribu-
tion addressed these problems of technique, sensitivity and the need for clear
formulation, problems that paralleled those encountered by others who prac-
ticed according to very different models, his work had traction for a con-
siderably large group of analysts outside the Kleinian tradition.
Kris’s notion of functional neutrality resulted from a struggle to provide
balance to the ways in which we think about neutrality from the patient’s
experiential point of view. For some patients, the analyst’s neutral stance, no
matter how thoughtful and caring, may be felt as depriving and persecutory if
their self-loathing is too great. So, too, and most importantly, a patient with
massive levels of self-reproach is prone to experience the analyst’s thoughtful
reserve as a confirmation of their unworthiness. Again, like Steiner, Kris is
focused on the analyst’s need to assess the patient’s exquisite sensitivity to their
psychic pain and adaptation (affliction) that requires the patient to incorporate
the analyst’s interpretations into persecutory or self-hating systems.
I think that both Steiner’s ideas about analyst- and patient-centered inter-
pretations and Kris’s theories on functional neutrality reflect some parallel
development in addressing the problems around empathic rupture and narcis-
sism in clinical work and the patient’s experience of the analyst, which were
both important clinical problems being discussed at the time across all psycho-
analytic theories. So perhaps there is something of a climate in psychoanalytic
theorizing at any particular point in time that leads to interest among analysts’
similar clinical problems.
A related example to both Steiner and Kris from a still different perspective
was provided by Greenberg (1986) in his view of the concept of analytic neu-
trality. Greenberg related neutrality to the analyst’s needed functions to gauge
the degree to which the patient experiences the analyst as an old versus new or
safe versus dangerous object. Like Steiner and Kris from different theoretical
perspectives, Greenberg is emphasizing the importance of the analyst’s need to
assess these dimensions in the uniqueness of each clinical context. Mitchell’s
body of work often emphasized the analyst’s ongoing read of the tensions
between the containing and expressive functions of the analyst, a point of view
he expressed in his appreciation for emphasis on containment in some con-
temporary Kleinian thinking (e.g., Mitchell, 1995).
Thus, in the clinical contributions that I have emphasized in this chapter,
what we see is an emergent form of analytic theorizing that is pragmatic and to
some extent technical, though not prescriptive. Part of the reason that it is not
and cannot be prescriptive is that despite the theoretical differences in some of
the theorists whom I have described, there is a universal appreciation for the
unique qualities of the analyst and the patient as asymmetrical co-participants
in determining what is too much and too little in the technical decisions that are
being assessed. Each analyst will have a different threshold for working crea-
tively with the patient’s internal objects and tolerating the patient’s frustration,
anger, disappointment, excitement and loving feelings, and these are also quite
variable in relationship to each patient. What is most important is that these

clinical contributions put into focus a level of theoretical discourse that
emphasizes the unique qualities of the analyst’s sensibility in making assess-
ments about how the analytic process is moving forward, standing still, or
actually stultified.
At some level, perhaps these contributions relate to something as simple as
our body of common sense in clinical analysis. It is likely that all developments
in clinical theory grow out of consciously or unconsciously realized limitations
in one’s own technique or theory. We could take each of the examples I’ve
examined in this chapter and extract from them some basic ideas, some lessons
learned, that might read as follows: if your patient is overwhelmed by inter-
pretations that refer to the nature of your relationship with the patient, then
consider making the interpretation at a different level of experience or symbolic
level. How are psychoanalysts ever able to be certain of their interpretations?
How does one gauge the nature of analytic neutrality except in a relationship
with another particular person, and if his level of self-loathing is very high, then
may providing more support help him to work on other levels of observing his
mind and experience? How does an analyst see what is important in a patient
when the patient’s experience, values or fantasies are quite aligned with those
of the analyst? What allows the analyst to see the forest through the trees?
Since Freud, psychoanalysts have had difficulty finding a grand unified theory,
in certain ways not unlike how physicists have been searching for a grand uni-
fied theory for particle physics. It would seem now that most psychoanalysts
offer a more modest form of clinical theory based on their own work and
observations generated by their own theoretical predilections. We live with
several different central models of psychoanalytic understanding and technique.
Yet we do communicate across intellectual, psychic, and geographical divides,
even when that is not our explicit intention.
I have suggested here that despite the pluralistic world of psychoanalytic
theory in which we now live, some forms of clinical theory unintentionally
provide us with a kind of border language—language that extends particular
ways of seeing to speak to analysts’ broader clinical and theoretical concerns.
At a speculative level, the theory that I have tried to describe here tells us de
facto about some of the ways that analysts across orientations unwittingly
communicate about their clinical findings. Some of these contributions may also
reflect the positive and generative outcome that has resulted from analysts who
are digesting each other’s work, though I have tried to be cautious about only
making this assertion in response to an author’s explicit reference to outside
influence (e.g., Greenberg, 1995; Kris, 1990; Spezzano, 2007). In psychoanalytic
terms, this reflects levels of theoretical interpenetration and integration, perhaps
even a working through of a sort, in the analytic world in which we live.
Students of psychoanalysis over the last 30 years, particularly in the United
States, have been struggling with the problems posed by learning multiple
models. At the very least, American psychoanalysts began reading and teaching
analytic writings from the UK and South America with much more frequency in
the decades of the 1980s than had previously been the case. Nothing is more
important than a thorough immersion, reading and thinking deeply within a
particular clinical model. Additionally, however, there is something to be said
about the importance of teaching how particular elements of theory link with
other theories. For example, in reading Michael Feldman’s (1997) paper, we are
able to teach students about the longstanding concerns of a contemporary Kleinian
orientation while at the same time helping them to understand the reach involved
in grappling more with the analyst’s participation with his patients. Kris’s
(1990) paper on functional neutrality allows students to learn about Anna
Freud’s seminal contribution that neutral interpretations are positioned equidi-
stant between the patient’s id, ego, and superego while adding a dimension that
includes the analyst’s pragmatic and necessary subjective assessment of these
dimensions. Furthermore, Kris’s perspective allows students to put into focus the
notion, developing in stops and starts throughout the last half of the twentieth
century, that schematic divisions between interpretation and support as well as
interpretation and suggestion were really just that—often artificial distinctions
that are intrinsically far more blurry in the daily work of analysis.
Perhaps there are even ways that learning more about tendencies of analysts
to write about clinical problems that link to other theoretical approaches will
facilitate grasping differences and nuance within each theory. Clinical theory
becomes more enlivening to the extent that we know more about particular
kinds of limitations in theory that become inflection points in theory develop-
ment. It allows students to feel the analyst’s struggles with using and reconcil-
ing clinical theory and clinical work. These contributions offer us elements of
the theorist’s conscious and unconscious conflicts in theorizing that we are
seeking to resolve through thinking, writing and reading about our work. They
involve the analyst at work.
References
Benjamin, J. (2004). Beyond doer and done to: An intersubjective view of thirdness.
Bernstein, L. (1973). The Unanswered Question. Lectures presented at Harvard
University.
Canestri, J. (2003). The logic of psychoanalytical research. In M. Leuzinger-Bohleber, A.
U. Dreher, & J. Canestri (Eds.), Pluralism and Unity? Methods of Research in
Psychoanalysis (pp113–123). London: International Psychoanalytic Library.
Canestri, J. (2005). Some reflections on the use and meaning of conflict in contemporary
psychoanalysis. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 74: 295–326.
Canestri, J., Bohleber, W., Denis, P., & Fonagy, P. (2006). The map of private (implicit,
pre-conscious) theories in clinical practice. In J. Canestri (Ed.), Psychoanalysis: From
Practice to Theory (pp29–44). Chichester: Whurr.
Cooper, S. (1989). Recent contributions to the theory of defense mechanisms: A comparative
view. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 37: 865–891.
Cooper, S. (2000). Objects of Hope: Exploring Possibility and Limit in Psychoanalysis.
Hillsdale, NJ: The Analytic Press.
Cooper, S. (2007) Begin the beguine: Relational theory and the pluralistic third.
Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 17: 247–271. London: Routledge
Cooper, S. (2010). A Disturbance in the Field: Essays in Transference-Countertransference
Engagement. New York, NY: Routledge.
Feldman, M. (1997). Projective identification: The analyst’s contribution. International

Fonagy, P. (1996). Playing with reality: I. Theory of mind and the normal development
of object relations. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 77: 217–233.
Freud, S. (1915). Letter to Ferenczi, August 1915. In The Correspondence of
Sigmund Freud and Sándor Ferenczi, Volume 2: 1914–1919. Cambridge: Belknap
Press.
Gill, M. M. (1976). Early interpretation of transference. Journal of the American
Gill, M. M. (1983). Analysis of Transference, Volume 1: Theory and Technique. New
York, NY: International Universities Press.
Gill, M. M. (1994). Psychoanalysis in Transition: A Personal View. Hillsdale, NJ:
Analytic Press.
Green, A. (2005). The illusion of common ground and mythic pluralism. International
Greenberg, J. (1986). Theoretical models and the analyst’s neutrality. Contemporary
Greenberg, J. (1995). Psychoanalytic technique and the interactive matrix. Psychoanalytic
Greenberg, J., & Mitchell, S. A. (1983). Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Harris, A. (2011). The relational tradition: Landscape and canon. Journal of the American
Harris, A. (2009) You must remember this. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 19: 2–21.
Hirsch, I. (1995). Changing conceptions of the unconscious. Contemporary
Hoffman, I. Z. (1983). The patient as interpreter of the analyst’s experience.
Hoffman, I. Z. (1991). Discussion: Toward a social-constructionist view of the
psychoanalytic situation. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 1: 74–105.
Kernberg, O. (1993). Convergences and divergences in contemporary psychoanalytic
technique. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 74: 659–673.
Kohut, H. (1979). The two analyses of Mr Z. International Journal of Psychoanalysis,
60: 3–27.
Kris, A. O. (1982). Free Association: Method and Process. New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press.
Kris, A. O. (1985). Resistance in convergent and in divergent conflicts. Psychoanalytic
Quarterly, 54: 537–568.

LaFarge, L. (2004). The imaginer and the imagined. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 73: 591–625.
LaFarge, L. (2008). On knowing oneself directly and through others. Psychoanalytic
Quarterly, 77: 167–197.
Margulies, A. (2014). Discussion of S. Cooper’s paper, “Clinical theory at the border(s): Con-
sidering an emergent type of theory in a post-pluralistic psychoanalysis.” International
Journal of Psychoanalysis, Open.
Inquiry, 11: 147–171.

Mitchell, S. A. (1995). Interaction in the Kleinian and interpersonal traditions.
Mitchell, S. A. (1997). Influence and Autonomy in Psychoanalysis. Hillsdale, NJ:
Analytic Press.
Mitchell, S. A. (2000). Relationality: From Attachment to Intersubjectivity. Hillsdale,
NJ: Analytic Press.
Modell, A. (1976). The “holding environment” and the therapeutic action of
psychoanalysis. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 24: 285–307.
Money-Kyrle, R. (1968). Cognitive development. International Journal of
Morrison, A. (1984). Working with shame in psychoanalytic treatment. Journal of the
Morrison, A. (2008). Shame—considerations and revisions: Discussion of papers by
Sandra Buechler and Donna Orange. Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 44: 105–109.
Ogden, T. (1979). On projective identification. International Journal of Psychoanalysis,
60: 357–373.
Ogden, T. (1994). The concept of interpretive action. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 63: 219–245.
O’Shaughnessy, E. (1992). Enclaves and excursions. International Journal of Psycho-
analysis, 73: 603–611.
Sandler, J. (1983). Reflections on some relations between psychoanalytic concepts and
psychoanalytic practice. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 64: 35–45.
Schafer, R. (1985a). Wild analysis. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association,
33: 275–300.
Schafer, R. (1985b). The interpretation of psychic reality, developmental influences, and
unconscious communication. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 33:
537–554.
Slochower, J. (1996). Holding and the fate of the analyst’s subjectivity. Psychoanalytic
Dialogues, 6: 323–353.
Smith, H. (2003). Conceptions of conflict in psychoanalytic theory and practice.
Steiner, J. (1994). Patient-centered and analyst-centered interpretations: Some implications

of containment and countertransference. Psychoanalytic Inquiry, 14: 406–422.
Steiner, J. (2008). Transference to the analyst as an excluded observer. International
Wolf, E. S. (1986). Discrepancies between analyst and analyst in experiencing the analysis.
In A. Goldberg (Ed), Progress in Self Psychology (Vol. 2). New York, NY: Guilford
Press.
Zimmer, R. (2014). Discussion of S. Cooper’s paper, “Clinical theory at the border(s): Con-
sidering an emergent type of theory in a post-pluralistic psychoanalysis.” International

Journal of Psychoanalysis Open.
Index
abandonment 2 psychoanalysis 9; relationship to the

aesthetic choices, patients 36–7 analytic process 82–95; relationship to
aesthetic elements, psychic boundaries the depressive position 3–4, 6, 16–23,
134, 135–41 25–6, 32–3, 87; relationship to theory
aesthetic experience 8 88–91; relationship with patients 2, 5,
aesthetic object, the 34 13, 15, 18, 20, 22–3, 26, 32, 46, 48,
aesthetic pleasure 42, 43 91–4, 105–6, 109; resistance 3; role 84;
affirmative attitude 22 self-reflection 110–3, 116; self-reflective
ambiguity, working with 15 participation 99; self-representation
American relational theory 5, 61–2, 34–5; sense of disappointment 2; silence
126, 131 112; sources of resistance 16; stance
analysis, intentions 15 14–5; strength 93; struggle 9–10;
analyst trying 95 struggles with the internal object
analyst-centered interpretations 155–7, 163 116–31; training 14, 83; unconscious
analysts: as an analytic object 158–60; conflicts 85–6; unsettling narrative 30
analytical mind 15; as artist 8; analytic attitude 22
attention to the internal object 99–103; analytic boundaries 144
authority 15, 22; capacity for solitude analytic neutrality 164, 165
21–2; capacity to bear pain 18; as analytic process, analysts relationship to
collaborative artists 32; comfort in 82–95, 130–1; and fantasy of refuge
working 20; deadening 58; development 83–4; clinical training 83; and
of theories 21; disturbances in listening countertransference 85; inner attitude
126; doubts 19, 22; envy 29, 38–44, 54, of uncertainty about 93–4; the internal
83; as facilitator 61; failures 116, 121, analytic setting 87–8; relationship to
125, 131; fantasies 23, 34, 40–1, 43, 48, progress 91–4; relationship to theory
49, 53–4, 55, 67, 82, 83–4, 84–5; goals 88–91, 94; self-analysis 82; theoretical
7; greed 56–7; grief 3, 40–1; inner background 84–8
attitude 43–4, 93–4, 94; as internal anger 37, 65, 70, 108, 125–6
object 61, 66, 67, 79, 117–9; internal anticipation 23
objects 102–3, 108; limitations 3, 10, 29, anxiety 75
49, 50, 116, 131; mistakes 6; need for appreciation 46
privacy 98–9, 110–1; as a new bad art 13; appreciation of 31, 43
object 123–30, 130–1; as a new object Arthur (patient) 125–6
122–4; as object of humiliation 68; as artistic motivation 42
persons 94–5; psychological privileges associations, and repetition 51–2
43; rejection of the everyday 56; associative processes 32, 103
relationally oriented 100; relationship atavistic, the, animating 103, 104–9
to progress 91–4; relationship to attachment theory 98
Index 171
authenticity 95 in 128; defensive idealization 89–90;

authority 110 reactions 83; resistance 66–7, 120;
avoidance 53 Winnicott’s model 17–8
Courtauld, A. 21
Baldwin, James 15 curiosity 33
Baranger, M. 25
Bass, A. 101, 102, 146 Dana (patient) 88–91
beauty 31, 34, 140 Davies, J. 102
Beckett, Samuel 3, 17, 47, 58, 87, 95 de Alvarez de Toledo, L. 24
behavioral boundaries 141, 142, 143 De Beistegui 76

Bell, C. 13, 42–3, 140 dead mother, the 107
Benjamin, J. 108, 157 deadening 58
Bernstein, Leonard 149 depressive position: analysts relationship
Bion, W. R. 6, 15, 21, 32, 33, 117, 139, to 3–4, 6, 25–6, 32–3, 87; closeness to
140, 141 14–5; definition 3; Freud’s summary of
Bolognini 139 13–4; Klein’s characterization of 16–7;
border language 165 listening in 21; origins 33; resistance to
Boston Change Process Study Group 3, 3–4, 47–8; Schafer on 18–9;
(BCPSG) 100 Winnicott on 17–8
boundaries 10, 136. see also psychic destructive relationships 104–9, 128–30
boundaries destructiveness, patients 59
boundary artists 87, 98, 135–41 Diebenkorn, Richard 7, 98, 137, 140
boundary crossing 146 Director, L. 67–8
boundary science 135–6 disappointment 2, 29, 50; accepting 47;
boundary violation 10, 134, 141–6 bearing 8; containers for 55–60;
Britton, R. 14, 32–3, 33, 127 experiences of 8, 30–2; good enough
Bromberg, Philip 5, 6, 62, 95, 100, 55, 57
102, 135 disavowal 54
Buechler, S. 21 doubts 19, 22, 29
dreams 37–8
Canestri, J. 149, 162–3 dream-work 25
Chabon, M. 41, 136–7
change 29, 30; patients resistance to 33–4; effectiveness, feeling of 53
radical 47; subtlety of 57 ego psychology 153, 156, 158
childhood 136–7 empathic rupture 164
Chused, J. F. 6 empathy 29, 144–5
Civitarese, G. 79, 108, 117 envy 29, 38–44, 53, 54, 83
clinical bridge theory 153–4, 160–2 ethical behavior 134, 135, 137, 143–4
clinical encounter, the 5–6 everyday, the, rejection of 56
clinical imagination 98–9, 112 expectations, disappointed 23, 49
commitment 94 experience, generating 21
communicating, to patients 155–7
comparative psychoanalysis 149 failing better 4, 47, 95
compassion 46 Fairbairn, R. 33, 78, 92, 105, 124
co-narrative transformation 73 fantasies 8–9, 155; analysts 23, 34, 40–1,
concern 3 43, 49, 53–4, 55, 67, 82, 83–4, 84–5;
conflicts 2, 47 LaFarge’s analysis 72; patients 89–90,
Cooper, S. 3, 19–20, 23, 34, 48–9, 49, 57, 127–8, 159; persecutory 49
86, 122, 157 Feldman, M. 5, 7, 19, 41, 62, 101, 119,
Cooperman, Martin 90–1 126–7, 127, 130, 150, 154, 154–5, 166
countertransference 2, 3, 5, 16, 22, 24–5, Ferenczi, S. 98, 123
46, 48, 53, 54, 82, 85, 118, 160; changes Ferrante, Elena 13
172 Index
Ferro, A. 73 impermanence, personal 31–2

fiction 137 inauthenticity 138
fishing 23–4 incompleteness 1–3, 4, 47, 49, 59;
Foehl, J. C. 110 acceptance of 17; bearing 8; capacity to
Foucault, M. 121 accept 13; functions 2; patients 7
free association 19 Independent tradition, the 5
freedom 13, 41, 42–3, 68, 72, 97 inner attitude 43–4, 93–4, 94
Freud, Anna 166 instruction, Independent tradition 23–4
Freud, Sigmund 33, 137; on the depressive interactive matrix, the 153–4
position 13–4; dream-work 25; and internal analytic setting, the 20–1, 87–8
grief 30; invention of psychoanalysis internal object relations 99–103, 104–9, 152
134, 135–6; on psychoanalysis 85; internal object, the 9–10, 18, 35–8, 38,
relationship to the analytic process 85; 61–2, 66, 75–7, 79, 97, 98; analysts
and repetition 46; and theories 163; 102–3, 108; analysts attention to
theory of mind 13–4; on transference 99–103; analysts struggles with 116–31;
122, 123, 135, 139 destructive 104–9; good enough object
Friedman, L. 30, 85, 110 125; new bad object 116, 117–9,
Fromm-Reichmann, F. 21 122–30, 130–1; new good object
functional neutrality 157–8, 164 117–8, 122–30; patients new object
experience 121; understanding 100, 102
Gabbard, Glen 143–4, 145 internal saboteurs 78, 100–1, 105
Ghent, E. 108 internal verbalization 24
Gill, M. M. 151, 160–1 internalized object relations 57–8, 102,
Goldberg, A. 143 113, 118, 155
good enough: disappointment 55; internalized phantasies, patients 5
disillusionment 57, 61; impingement International Psychoanalytical Association
124–5; misunderstanding 76 (IPA) 149
good enough object, the 125 interpersonal theory 97, 98, 153
gratification 32 interpretive fallibility 6, 161–2
greed 56–7 intimacy 48
Green, A. 20, 21, 107, 112, 148 irritability 39
Greenberg, J. 101, 153–4, 155, 164 Isaacs, Susan 16, 32
grief 3, 37, 40–1; containers for 55;
experiences of 29, 30–2; as treatment Judt, T. 140
30; unresolved 53–4
grief therapy 30 Kate (patient) 40, 49–50, 50–5, 56, 59
Grossman, W. I. 135 Keats, J. 139
guilt 63, 108 Klein, Melanie 3, 6, 16, 16–7
Kleinian theory 5, 61–2, 126, 131, 150,
Harris, A. 41, 43, 99 151, 152, 156, 158, 161, 163
Heaney, Seamus 4 Kohut, H. 90, 157–8
Hoffman, I. Z. 161–2 Kris, A. O. 157–8, 164, 166
hopefulness 14, 17, 31
hostility 58 LaFarge, L. 72, 127, 159
humiliation, analysts as object of 68 Lanzmann, Claude 100
humor 50–1, 52, 52–3, 53, 54, 55, 144 Levenson, E. A. 6, 116
Levine, H. 139
idealism 4 Levine, S. 32, 34
idealization 23; defensive 88–91 Levit, D. 57
identification 144–5 limitations 6, 29, 47; analysts 3, 10, 29, 49,
illusions 110 50, 116, 131; for change 14; patients 86;
imaginative ability 29 theory 165
Index 173
linguistic play 73 new good object 117–8, 122–30

listening 20, 21, 71, 88, 126, 130–1 newness 117, 121, 122–3
listening position, the 8, 24 Nietzsche, F. 135, 138
Loewald, H. 123–4 non-complacency 46
loneliness 21–2 novelists 13
M, Mr.: anger 65, 70; anxiety 69, 75; object relations 30, 99–103, 104–9, 152
associations 74; difficulty speaking 64; object relations theory 9, 97, 98, 124
eagerness 62; emergence 72; fantasies of Oedipus complex 14, 22, 32–3
67; fear 76, 79; fear of loss of control Ogden, T. 6, 17–8, 21, 32, 98, 100, 108,
75–6; fear of speaking 67; freedom 72; 109, 112, 144, 159
guilt 63; history 62–4; impressions of Olivia (patient) 128–30
66; internal objects 75–7; primary point O’Shaughnessy, E. 41, 123, 127, 130, 155
of linguistic communication 70;
relationship with girls 68–9, 74; pain, analyst’s capacity to bear 18
relationship with parents 63–4, 65, 66, Palmer, Jonathan 14–5
67, 75, 76, 78; self-assessments 64–5; paranoid positions 34
session one 68–73; session two 73–8; paranoid-schizoid position 6, 82, 162
silence 62–8, 68, 69, 70, 75; subjective Parat, C. J. 139
experience 75–7; transition to verbal Parsons, Michael 1, 3, 20–1, 85, 87, 126,
expressiveness 65–6, 67–8, 68–78; 139, 141, 160
use of isolation 71; vulnerability 69–70, patience 3
70–1, 71 patient-centered interpretations 7,
Marcus (patient) 59, 91–4 155–7, 163
Mark, James 23–4 patients 13; adaptation to psychic pain 8;
Mead, M. 30 aesthetic choices 36–7; aliveness 78;
meaning: creating 32; exploring 137–8 analysts envy of 38–44; anxiety 54, 69;
melancholic compromise 50 avoidance 54, 129; capacity to mourn
mental life 16 47; as collaborative artists 32;
metaphor 79 communicating to 155–7; danger 54;
metapsychology 99 destructiveness 59; disappointment 2;
metatheory 97, 99 envy 29, 38, 39; expectations 8;
mind: analytical 15; Freud’s theory of fantasies 8–9, 26, 89–90, 127–8, 159,
13–4; home for 18, 158–60 162; forward movement 100; freedom
mistakes 6, 86–7 41, 42–3, 68; hostility 58; idealization of
Mitchell, S. A. 5, 62, 99, 111–2, 153, analysts 88–91; idealized 34;
159, 164 incompleteness 7; internal narrative 13;
Modell, A. H. 30, 103, 110–1, 145, internal object 18, 61–2, 75–7, 98;
156–7, 160 internal object relations 104–9, 113;
modesty 14 internal saboteurs 100–1, 105; internal
Money-Kryle, R. 25, 97, 158–9 world 6–7, 20; internalized object
Morrison, A. 157 relations 155; internalized phantasies 5;
Motherwell, Robert 86–7 irrevocable condition 98; key to
mourning 37, 47 understanding 6–7; legitimacy of
mutuality, importance of 101 feelings 65; limitations 1–2, 14, 86;
meaning 21; new object experience 121;
Nacht, S. 43, 93, 94 privacy 110, 111; relationship to the
narcissism, in clinical work 164 depressive position 16; relationship
negative, the, internalization of 20 with analyst 2, 5, 13, 15, 18, 20, 22–3,
negative capability 139 26, 32, 46, 48, 91–4, 105–6, 109;
new bad object 9–10, 116, 117–8, resistance 33–4, 156; self-reflection 111;
122–30, 130–1 sense of accomplishment 29; sexual
174 Index
relationships with 141–6; shame 59, (patient) 50–5; projective identification

156; silence 8–9, 61, 62–8; unconscious patterns 58–9; and reflection 52; and
life 117; value of treatment 22; verbal seeing something new 46, 55–6; struggle
expressiveness 61–79 with 29; symptoms of resistance to
personal participation 113 56–8
personality 16 repetition compulsion 46
play 32 resistance: to envy 38–44; patients 33–4.
pluralism 151, 152–3 156; sources 47–8; sources of 29
positive aggression 33 Rilke, R. 31, 58, 140
post-pluralistic 10–1 risk 15

privacy 22; need for 98–9, 110–1; patients Rosenfeld, H. 2, 5, 37, 41, 47–8, 49, 55, 62
110
private selves 94–5 Sachs, H. 31
progress, analysts relationship to 91–4 Sandler, J. 25–6, 149, 151
projective identification 58–9, 144–5, 146, Sarah (patient) 35–8
151–2, 154–5 Schafer, R. 2, 16, 18–9, 20, 21, 39, 48, 49,
psychic base 18, 97, 159 53, 55
psychic boundaries 134–6; aesthetic Searles, H. 85, 112
elements 134, 135–41; blurred 139–40; Segal, H. 31, 42, 43
borderland 138; boundary violation self-care 20
134, 141–6; crossing 146; dissemblance self-criticism 29, 48, 157
135; processes 141 self-esteem 39
psychic cohabitation 139 selfhood 36
psychic pain 8, 15 self-knowledge 15
psychic play 86–7 self-loathing, grandiosity of 19–20, 48–9
psychic reality 21 self-psychology 98
psychic touch 54 self-reflection 5, 25, 62, 98–9, 110–3, 116
psychoanalysis 8; achievement 4; aims 102; self-reflective participation 99
analyst’s relationship to 9; dialogic self-representation 34–5
nature of 102; doing 1, 4–5; framework self-reproach 19, 48–9
of 140; functions 8; incompleteness 1–3, sexual abstinence 144–5
4; intentions 15; as laborative art 8; sexual excitement 2
limitations 1, 6, 16, 20; reasons for 2; sexual harassment 142
role 4; social compact 134 sexual language 142
psychoanalytic hope 31 sexual misconduct 10, 134, 135, 141–6
psychoanalytic method 118, 119 shame 156
psychological privileges 43 silence: absence of words 79; analysts 112;
and .fear of loss of control 75–6
Rachael (patient) 103, 104–9 silence, patients 8–9, 61, 62–8, 78; and
Racker, H. 4, 6, 112 anger 65; breaking 65; fear of speaking
Raphling, D. L. 6 67; transition to verbal expressiveness
reflection 52, 130–1 65–6, 67–8, 68–78, 78–9
Reich, A. 85 Sillman, Amy 137
relational theory 9, 97, 98, 99, 101 Slochower, J. 110, 157
repetition 2, 100; and associations 51–2; Smith, H. 23, 34, 49, 126, 149, 150
bearing 8, 32–8, 46, 47, 54, 55; social-constructivism 161–2
challenge of 55–6; compulsion 46; solitude, capacity to bear 21–2
density of 57; endless 37, 47–8; Spezzano, C. 26, 97, 139, 158–60
frustration with 54–5; good enough stalemated analyses 38
experiences o 46–59; importance of 46; Steiner, J. 7, 22, 78, 155–7, 158, 159, 163–4
and internalized object relations 57–8; Stern, D. B. 102, 111
interpersonal meaning 46–7; Kate Strachey, J. 122–3
Index 175
Strange Attractor Theory 150 unconscious, the 5, 16, 32

stultification 54 unconscious desires, revealing 19
success 6 unconscious internalized object
supervision groups 46 relationships 61–2
symbolization 25 unconscious re-living 42
synchrony 50 understanding 33, 55; resistance to 61
understanding work 25–6
termination 16–23 United Kingdom 150–3
theory 11: analysts relationship to 88–91, unobjectionable positive transference 123
94; attachment to 91; clinical and unobjectionable transference 66

educational implications 162–6; clinical
bridge theory 153–4, 160–2; definition verbal expressiveness, patients 61–79;
162–3; development 148–66; grand absence of words 79; emergence 72;
unified 165; limitations 165; model 152; linguistic play 73; and listening 71;
pluralistic 151, 152–3; and practice 149; primary point of linguistic
reach of 150–3 communication 70; for schizoid
therapeutic action 6, 90, 95, 124, 126 individuals 78; silence 61, 62–8, 78;
therapeutic neutrality 14 transition from silence 65–6, 67–8,
training analysis 47 68–78, 78–9
transference 2, 8–9, 20, 48, 86, 135, 138, virtual realities 143
139; dynamics of 122; Gill’s interpreta-
tion 160–1; hostile 89–90; idealizing 39; Wallace, David Foster 101, 137
intensity 125–6; maternal 90; negative Winnicott, D. W. 3, 16, 17–8, 21, 32, 33,
22, 58; psychotic 38; sources of 72; 55, 103, 124–5, 156
unobjectionable 66; unobjectionable Woolf, V. 56
positive 123 Wordsworth, W. 35
transitional space 23–4 working, comfort in 20
trust 26
Tublin, S. 99 Zimmer, R. 163
e Taylor & Francis eBooks
Helping you to choose the right eBooks for your Library

Add Routledge titles to your library's digital collection today. Taylor and Francis
ebooks contains over 50,000 titles in the Humanities, Social Sciences, Behavioural
Sciences, Built Environment and Law.
Choose from a range of subject packages or create your own!
Benefits for you Benefits for your user

» Free MARC records » Off-site, anytime access via Athens
» COUNTER-compliant usage statistics or referring URL
» Flexible purchase and pricing options » Print or copy pages or chapters
» All titles DRM-free. » Full content search
» Bookmark, highlight and annotate text
eCollections
Free Trials Available » Access to thousands of pages of quality
eCollections
We offer free trials to qualifying
eCollections research at the click of a button.
eCollections
academic, corporate and
government customers.
eCollections - Choose from over 30 subject eColiections, including:

I Archaeology Language Learning
Architecture
• Law
ASian Studies Literature
Business & Management Media & CommUnication
• Classical Studies • Middle East Studies
Construction MusIc
Creative & Media Arts Philosophy
• Criminology & Criminal Justice Planning
Economics • Politics
Education Psychology & Mental Health
Energy Religion
.. Engineering • Security
English Language & Linguistics Social Work
Environment & Sustalnabllity Sociology
• Geography Sport
Health Studies • Theatre & Performance
History TOUrism, Hospitality & Events
For more information, pricing enquiries or to order a free trial, please contact your local sales team:
www.tandfebooks.com/page/sales
n Routledge
T,yloc&F"omGwup
I The home of
Routiedge books
df b
www.taneoos.com
k

The Analyst's Experience of The Depressive Position

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

The Analyst's Experience of The Depressive Position

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:56 29 November 2016

The Analyst’s Experience of the

In The Analyst’s Experience of the Depressive Position: The melancholic

Steven H. Cooper is a psychoanalyst and teacher well known internationally for

This page intentionally left blank

The melancholic errand of psychoanalysis

ISBN: 978-1-138-84410-0 (hbk)

Dedication: To Abraham and Leon

This page intentionally left blank

Psychoanalysis is always an incomplete process. What we help patients to

To be sure, for some patients the ways in which incompleteness or limitation is

Some patients rail against limitation because it echoes earlier deprivation

chotherapists have undergone an important shift in how we think about the

invited to know these parts of our patients, psychoanalysis often involves a

regard as relatively better work. Lest it be in any way unclear, it is considerably

of uncertainty.” Earlier in my career (Cooper, 1996), I used the term inter-

Organization of the book

If the last 35 years of psychoanalysis tell us anything, it is that we have

to the ﬁeld of psychoanalysis: I examine the analyst’s relationship to his own

analyst’s struggle in this regard involves repeated sequences of being recruited

The term post-pluralistic was found to be somewhat controversial to both

kind of border language—language that extends particular ways of seeing to

Parsons, M. (2006). The analyst’s countertransference to the psychoanalytic process.

Ruin and beauty I: Some basic

Freud’s psychiatric discovery of something that, of course, had been deeply

Some ways of thinking about the analyst’s capacities for the

that it is mixed with aggressive potential. Furthermore, defenses and uncon-

Winnicott is suggesting that only if the analyst is able to contain/live with

Its constituent elements have been speciﬁed only when countertransference

ance on the primitive defenses and omnipotent fantasies and lead to

sometimes involves the analyst's obliviousness to her own self-care (Harris,

patient’s memory of the primitive mother” (Green, 2011, p171). In an attempt

This listening is notably unconventional in terms of human conversation and

Furthermore, patients often contain elements of the analyst’s experience,

by a victory of one party over the other. Identiﬁcations have to be abandoned,

A similar version of this notion of a more natural transformation of the

processes of symbolization and learning to speak—a frontier where there is

of our own associations, self-observation, and self-analysis to gain some access

from the depressive position.

Bion, W. R. (1962). Learning from Experience. London: Heinemann.

Cooper, S.(2010b). A Disturbance in the Field: Essays in Transference-Countertransference.

Nacht, S. (1962). The curative factors in psychoanalysis. International Journal of

Ruin and beauty II: The analyst’s

Each analysis that we have the privilege of “completing” involves running

Seeking containers for the analyst’s grief and disappointment:

time; sometimes there is sadness summarized by the question/statement: “So,

I ﬁnd it useful to think of the patient and analyst as collaborative artists,

Some of the analyst’s obstacles to working in the depressive

Smith (2004) suggested that each of us holds conscious and unconscious

obstacles to analytic work. In turn, making use of these anticipatory fantasies

Recollections of Early Childhood”: “to ﬁnd strength in what remains behind

able to see how much she was frightened of her self-productions.

The patient’s and analyst’s envy

problems or our irritability. He stated:

Short of the envious patient, many patients become understandably angry,

potential meanings of this countertransference and the analyst’s fantasies about

contender” (Kazan, 1954). Whatever the origin of these preoccupations of the

for helping us to understand elements of the depressive position in analytic work

Levine, S. (2003). Beauty treatment: The aesthetics of the psychoanalytic process.

technique. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 73: 167–196.

The melancholic errand of

A familiar feeling comes up in the supervision groups I’ve participated in over

conﬂict and incompleteness, hallmarks of the depressive position. It is a curious