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 RELATIONAL PERSPECTIVES BOOK SERIES
LEWIS ARON & ADRIENNE HARRIS
Series Editors

Vol. 46 Vol. 35
A Disturbance in the Field: Comparative-Integrative Psychoanalysis:
Essays in Transference-Countertransference A Relational Perspective for the Discipline’s
Engagement Second Century
Steven H. Cooper Brent Willock

Vol. 45 Vol. 34
First Do No Harm: Relational Psychoanalysis, V. III: New Voices
The Paradoxical Encounters of Melanie Suchet, Adrienne Harris, & Lewis Aron
Psychoanalysis, Warmaking, and Resistance (eds.)
Adrienne Harris & Steven Botticelli (eds.)
Vol. 33
Vol. 44 Creating Bodies:
Good Enough Endings: Eating Disorders as Self-Destructive Survival
Breaks, Interruptions, and Terminations Katie Gentile
from Contemporary Relational Perspectives
Jill Salberg (ed.) Vol. 32
Getting From Here to There:
Vol. 43 Analytic Love, Analytic Process
Invasive Objects: Minds Under Siege Sheldon Bach
Paul Williams
Vol. 31
Vol. 42 Unconscious Fantasies and the Relational World
Sabert Basescu: Danielle Knafo & Kenneth Feiner
Selected Papers on Human Nature and
Psychoanalysis Vol. 30
George Goldstein & Helen Golden (eds.) The Healer’s Bent:
Solitude and Dialogue in the Clinical Encounter
Vol. 41 James T. McLaughlin
The Hero in the Mirror:
From Fear to Fortitude Vol. 29
Sue Grand Child Therapy in the Great Outdoors:
A Relational View
Vol. 40 Sebastiano Santostefano
The Analyst in the Inner City, Second Edition:
Race, Class, and Culture Through a Vol. 28
Psychoanalytic Lens Relational Psychoanalysis, V. II:
Neil Altman Innovation and Expansion
Vol. 39 Lewis Aron & Adrienne Harris (eds.)
Dare to be Human: Vol. 27
A Contemporary Psychoanalytic Journey The Designed Self:
Michael Shoshani Rosenbaum Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Identities
Vol. 38 Carlo Strenger
Repair of the Soul: Metaphors of Transformation
Vol. 26
in Jewish Mysticism and Psychoanalysis
Impossible Training:
Karen E. Starr
A Relational View of Psychoanalytic Education
Vol. 37 Emanuel Berman
Adolescent Identities:
A Collection of Readings Vol. 25
Deborah Browning (ed.) Gender as Soft Assembly
Adrienne Harris
Vol. 36
Bodies in Treatment: Vol. 24
The Unspoken Dimension Minding Spirituality
Frances Sommer Anderson (ed.) Randall Lehman Sorenson
 RELATIONAL PERSPECTIVES BOOK SERIES
LEWIS ARON & ADRIENNE HARRIS
Series Editors

Vol. 23 Vol. 11
September 11: Trauma and Human Bonds Building Bridges:
Susan W. Coates, Jane L. Rosenthal, & Daniel S. Negotiation of Paradox in Psychoanalysis
Schechter (eds.) Stuart A. Pizer
Vol. 22 Vol. 10
Sexuality, Intimacy, Power Fairbairn, Then and Now
Muriel Dimen Neil J. Skolnick and David E. Scharff (eds.)
Vol. 21 Vol. 9
Looking for Ground: Countertransference Influence and Autonomy in Psychoanalysis
and the Problem of Value in Psychoanalysis Stephen A. Mitchell
Peter G. M. Carnochan
Vol. 8
Vol. 20 Unformulated Experience:
Relationality: From Dissociation to Imagination in
From Attachment to Intersubjectivity Psychoanalysis
Stephen A. Mitchell Donnel B. Stern
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Who is the Dreamer, Who Dreams the Dream? Soul on the Couch:
A Study of Psychic Presences Spirituality, Religion, and Morality
James S. Grotstein in Contemporary Psychoanalysis
Charles Spezzano & Gerald J. Gargiulo (eds.)
Vol. 18
Objects of Hope: Vol. 6
Exploring Possibility and Limit in The Therapist as a Person:
Psychoanalysis Life Crises, Life Choices, Life
Steven H. Cooper Experiences,
and Their Effects on Treatment
Vol. 17
Barbara Gerson (ed.)
The Reproduction of Evil:
A Clinical and Cultural Perspective
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Sue Grand
Holding and Psychoanalysis:
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Psychoanalytic Participation: Joyce A. Slochower
Action, Interaction, and Integration
Kenneth A. Frank Vol. 4
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The Collapse of the Self and Its Therapeutic Lewis Aron
Restoration
Rochelle G. K. Kainer Vol. 3
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Relational Psychoanalysis: Psychoanalytic Lens
The Emergence of a Tradition Neil Altman
Stephen A. Mitchell & Lewis Aron (eds.)
Vol. 2
Vol. 13 Affect in Psychoanalysis:
Seduction, Surrender, and Transformation: A Clinical Synthesis
Emotional Engagement in the Analytic Process Charles Spezzano
Karen Maroda
Vol. 1
Vol. 12 Conversing with Uncertainty:
Relational Perspectives on the Body Practicing Psychotherapy in a Hospital Setting
Lewis Aron & Frances Sommer Anderson (eds.) Rita Wiley McCleary
 A
Disturbance
in the Field
Essays in
Transference-Countertransference
Engagement

STEVEN H. COOPER

New York London

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Cooper, Steven H., 1951-

A disturbance in the field : essays in transference-countertransference
engagement / Steven H. Cooper.
p. cm. -- (Relational perspectives book series ; v. 46)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-415-80628-2 (hardcover) -- ISBN 978-0-415-80629-9 (pbk.) --
ISBN 978-0-203-87178-2 (e-book)
1. Transference (Psychology) 2. Psychoanalysis. I. Title.

RC489.T73C66 2010
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To Jennifer Ellwood and Ruth Eleanor Mayer
Contents

Acknowledgments xi

1 Introduction: The romance and melancholia of loving

psychoanalysis 1

2 The grandiosity of self-loathing: Transference-

countertransference dimensions 19

3 Privacy, reverie, and the analyst’s ethical imagination 39

4 The analyst’s experience of being a transference

object:╯An elusive form of countertransference to
the╯psychoanalytic╯method? 59

5 The analyst’s anticipatory╯fantasies: Aid and

obstacle to the╯patient’s self-integration 83

6 Psychoanalytic process: Clinical and political dimensions 103

7 Good enough vulnerability, victimization,╯and

responsibility: Why one- and two-person
models╯need╯one╯another 129

8 The new bad object and the therapeutic action of

psychoanalysis 151

ix
xâ•… Contents

9 Franz Alexander’s corrective emotional experience

reconsidered 175

10 Working through and working within: The continuity

of€enactment in the termination process 195

References 209
Index 221
Acknowledgments

Adrienne Harris encouraged me to write this book. As I went along, she

critiqued it and helped me to shape my ideas. I appreciate her friendship and
generosity of spirit in helping me to find out more about how I currently
think about psychoanalysis. She was an exceptional editor in somehow
managing to be both direct and light of hand.
Kristopher Spring, my assistant editor from Taylor & Francis, pro-
vided a sense of possibility and encouragement about the project from
the╯�beginning. I have appreciated his responsiveness and flexibility during
the �writing process. He was a thoughtful collaborator in every sense.
For the last 4 years, I have had the opportunity to serve as one of the
joint chief editors of Psychoanalytic Dialogues with Anthony Bass and
Stephen Seligman and for the first year and a half with Neil Altman and
Jody Messler Davies. Tony, Stephen and Hazel Ipp, the executive editor,
and I have spent many hours together discussing psychoanalytic papers
and psychoanalytic publishing. Psychoanalytic Dialogues has been an
important clinical and intellectual community for me for many years, and
I appreciate my colleagues who serve on the editorial board of the jour-
nal. They all give a great deal of their time to the journal. For me, it has
been a challenging and rewarding labor of love. Anthony Bass and Stephen
Seligman generously read and helped me develop my ideas for two of the
chapters of this book, and I appreciate their input.
My friend and colleague James Frosch read and critiqued two of the
chapters in this book and, as has always been his way, gave generously of
his time. Henry Smith carefully read and critiqued Chapters 3 and 4 in var-
ious stages. His input was invaluable in helping me clarify my thoughts.
Over the last 4 years, I have resumed teaching at the Cambridge Health
Alliance (The Cambridge Hospital) at the Harvard Medical School after
having taught there from 1980 to 1990. Kimberlyn Leary gives tire-
lessly of herself to promote the psychodynamic training of young psy-
chologists at the hospital. With her support, I am honored to be able to
teach psychology interns and residents. Over the last 30 years at both
Cambridge Hospital and Beth Israel Hospital teaching has nourished my
xi
xiiâ•… Acknowledgments

thinking about psychoanalysis. These students at the hospital, the Boston

Psychoanalytic Institute and Society, and at the Massachusetts Institute
for Psychoanalysis have taught me a great deal.
I have been extraordinarily fortunate to be asked by my patients to try to
help them. I have had and continue to have much to learn.
This book is dedicated to my wife Jennifer Ellwood and my mother Ruth
Eleanor Mayer. Jennifer’s read of me, her support, her playfulness, and her
depth of friendship I treasure. She adorns the cover of this book.
Chapter 1

Introduction
The romance and melancholia
of loving psychoanalysis

The title of this book, A Disturbance in the Field, evokes for me the breadth
of experience for patient and analyst in relation to transition, disruption,
repair, and growth.
This is a book about transitions in clinical work. Some of the transi-
tions are subtle, such as when a patient is able to usefully open new parts
of himself in both an old and a new context. Other types of transition
relate to points of impasse. Often, the transitions described relate to peri-
ods when either or both patient and analyst begin to look at a constellation
of experiences or even what are traditionally termed symptoms in a differ-
ent way. Needs begin to be seen as demands; self-criticism begins to be seen
as related to unrealistic or perhaps even grandiose fantasies about the self;
patient or analyst begins to see the ways that the analysis itself has been
assaulted by unconsciously destructive trends.
I hope that I have been able to paint some pictures of the kind of atmo-
sphere that exists between patient and analyst in relation to these moments
of transition. Moreover, I try to talk about the analyst’s imagination as
he tries to grasp these transitions and to help the patient to expand his
imaginative capacity in integrating the meaning of transition. Despite my
strong interest in the mind of the analyst and countertransference as a
clinical tool, I do not want to overly valorize the countertransference. In
recent years I believe that we run the risk of emphasizing too much the
place of the analyst’s subjectivity in clinical work.
The “field” that I aim to illuminate is an intrapsychic and interpersonal
field. I am deeply interested in unconscious conflict, unconscious fantasy,
and the interpersonal process in analytic work. I cannot decide that one of
these surfaces is more important than another. The analyst tries to hold
these dimensions of field in his or her imagination and to make it knowable
to the patient just as the patient tries to do so for the analyst.
At this point in the history of psychoanalysis, our thinking, our clinical
work, and our journals are filled with the interpenetration of models. The
insights offered by one analyst are used and incorporated into the vision of

1
2╅ A disturbance in the field

another. It has taken us a while, but fortunately we have been able to begin
to grow beyond a kind of institutionalized splitting.
This collection of essays reflects my version of the intrapsychic and inter-
personal field. I hope that it captures a sense of how I am learning from my
patients and learning about psychoanalysis.
In each chapter, I try to demonstrate my use of these various models
since I am incapable of stepping back and in strictly theoretical terms to
describe how I have done so. I hope that I demonstrate how the concepts
of defense, conflict, state shifts, and compromise formation are essential
to understanding people and how, for me, it is impossible to utilize these
concepts without a two-person model.
I also try to show how we have stretched psychoanalytic concepts such as
transference, countertransference, enactment, and projective identification
to a kind of limit. I have no solutions to this problem in this book. I think
that this book constitutes my personal stretching of these terms to their
limit and my limit. What I continue to feel after 30 years of being a psy-
choanalyst is that there are two major frontiers that are equally important
in understanding analytic process: One is unconscious conflict and fantasy,
and the other is interpersonal experience and interaction. I offer this collec-
tion of essays as my best effort to illustrate how I integrate the two frontiers
in my clinical work and my thinking about theory.
Our language and concepts are indeed too limited. They continually
strain under the burdens of categorization and dichotomy. Terms such as
negative and positive transference, negative and positive countertransfer-
ence, good and bad objects, and new and old objects are as limited as the
dichotomies intrinsic to drive theory, such as libidinal and aggressive. If
there is anything one learns from doing analysis it is that all experience is
varied and layered and holds the complexity of many things at once. Our
language in psychoanalysis is still primitive and undeveloped. I wish that I
could say that I have redressed this problem in this book. What I have done
is try to get at and, no doubt, enact some of what Balint (1968) referred to
as the “poverty of interpretation.”
It is after all rather startling that we have one word for “I” or one word
for “self” despite the many meanings that these concepts entail. This speaks
to the nature of our ancient and impoverished language for getting at these
experiences. I suspect that future generations of analysts, particularly gen-
erations who do not grow up on the language of dichotomies, will be pro-
ductive in generating new ways of thinking about analytic process.
Yet, the problems are complicated partly by the fact that we come by
dichotomies quite honestly. While gender and identity are multifaceted, there
are some elements of dichotomy that are probably influenced by our anatom-
ical dichotomies. We are also either dead or alive, awake or asleep, hungry
or satiated, sexually gratified or frustrated, safe or dangerous no matter how
much we claim that these experiences or “facts” exist on a continuum.
 Introductionâ•… 3

In the remainder of this introduction, I would like to talk about some

�
less-emphasized aspects of theory since theory frames and holds our lan-
guage. I want to discuss less the many differences in the content of theory but
rather how we each hold our theory. Perhaps this discussion will serve as a
backdrop for the largely clinical chapters that follow. First, however, a note
on some elements of my overarching approach to clinical work follows.
It may be useful to briefly mention some crossroads, a few intersections
where theory relates to clinical work before exploring the ways that the analyst
holds his theory. I want to mention briefly the limitation of the two theories
that I find most useful and how other theories may help with these �limitations.
I value most the contributions of relational theory and contemporary Kleinian
approaches, and there are also concerns that I hold toward each.
The risks and perils accompanying analysts who term themselves rela-
tional is always the valorization of the analyst’s subjectivity to the exclusion
of a focus on the patient’s subjective experience. Any well disciplined, well
trained, and seasoned analyst of this stripe would object to this concern by
saying that we cannot know the patient’s experience except by attuning our-
selves to and honoring the analyst’s subjectivity. I agree. Yet it is far too easy
to dismiss the problems and hazards in this approach with this statement,
just as there are considerable hazards in all approaches to psychoanalysis.
A cartoon that I came across fifteen years ago captured the essence of the
problem. A man is dressed in work clothes and is speaking into the phone.
The caption reads: “Enough about me, you’re the one who called 911”.
The hazard of valorizing the analyst’s subjectivity is remedied by a dedica-
tion to the principle that I hold as invaluable—that analysts must devote
themselves to thinking about their participation. This self-reflective process
about why the analyst is feeling what he is feeling, why he is thinking or
not thinking about his patient in particular ways is a way of maintaining
a constant check on this hazard. I find invaluable the notion of always
considering how I am being recruited to be a particular kind of object by
the patient, a mode of disciplined listening that I have learned more about
by reading the work of Joseph, Feldman, Steiner, and Britton as well as the
work of Mitchell, Bromberg, and Davies. In my view this ability to think
about recruitment is the strength, and it is a considerable one, of the con-
temporary Kleinian and Independent School contributions to psychoanaly-
sis. Self–psychology always provides a useful lens on the matter of how the
analyst’s use of his own subjective responses may repeat earlier forms of
parental neglect or empathic failure toward the patient. Ego psychology
provides a way of thinking about the patient’s shifts from affect and idea
that the analyst can’t be aware of if he is too focused on his own subjective
reactions, no matter how much they are also informative.
But it is in thinking about the patient’s recruitment of us as objects and
our responsiveness to the patient; the patient’s internalization of our expe-
riences and our internalized object representations; the back and forth of
4╅ A disturbance in the field

this communication between internalized object worlds and interpersonal

interaction; the interplay of unconscious fantasy and “reality” that I find
both relational and Kleinian worlds indispensable to my work.
Relational Theory is a kind of meta-theory, an assemblage of overarch-
ing principles to approach clinical work. It does not provide a theory of
technique that can be entirely separated from elements of other approaches.
Instead it provides a set of working guidelines: it values disciplined listening
but not necessarily a set of prescribed techniques; it considers constantly
the analyst’s self-reflective participation (e.g. Mitchell, 1997); it values the
�dialectic between ritual and spontaneity (Hoffman, 1998), old and new
objects (Cooper and Levit, 1998), nuances of interplay of patient experience
and analyst’s modes of relating within interpretive positions (Benjamim,
2004); and it focuses on the ubiquity of enactment. It is why I think that
relational thinking has been to varying degrees integrated and incorpo-
rated into all theoretical orientations.
The risks and perils of Kleininan theory are those that relate to the
analyst’s vulnerability to minimize his own participation in enactment
and the impact that his participation has on his patient. I find invaluable
the Kleinian consideration that the analyst is complicit in the various
ways in which he is being recruited by the patient’s internalized object
world (e.g. Sandler, 1974; Feldman, 1997). But there is not enough con-
sideration of how the patient is receiving the analyst’s participation and
the ways in which enactment is constant (e.g. Mitchell, 1997; Cooper,
2008; Smith, 2000; 2008), not intermittent. The Kleinians are correct to
have concerns that various elements of analyst-disclosure (ie. disclosure
used to make interpretations) may enact collapses of therapeutic space
or even violate boundaries in repetitive self and object patterns devel-
oped earlier in the patient’s life. So too, I agree with Caper (1997) that
the analyst must have a mind of his own. But I believe that relational
perspective might be very useful to Kleinian analysts in helping them to
understand better a subject matter of great interest to them: the patient’s
access to the analyst’s mind. In my view the patient’s internalized object
relations and unconscious fantasy itself is always being influenced by
the interaction with the analyst (e.g. Bonovitz, 2004; Chapter 5 in this
book). Elements of relational theory provide ways of understanding a
dialogic structure that can help the patient to have access and make use
of the analyst’s mind, his formulations and experience (e.g. Benjamin,
2004; Davies, 2005).

How Do We Hold Our Theory?

I think that how the analyst holds his or her particular theory is at least as
important as the analyst’s choice of theory. I have a strong bias toward not
 Introductionâ•… 5

letting our love of analysis or love of a particular theory become a “usurp-

ing self” (Coleridge, 1834) in the form of fixed ideas about how things are
supposed to unfold in analysis. Love involves surrender and a willingness
to give up or reconfigure parts of self in the service of an ideal, such as get-
ting closer to another, protecting another, or honoring another. In analy-
sis, surrender is related to the goal of helping someone understand himself
more fully. The valorization of a theory or an idea about how analytic
work is supposed to go, in contrast to surrender, involves the obliteration
of another person or of self, a usurping self. The theory is a success, but the
patient dies.
Even more important, I think what helps people in psychoanalysis in
large degrees is the experience of knowing oneself and learning about one-
self in the presence of another self. If the analyst is absorbed by his or her
method and theory, too much in love with those objects, as it were, then
the analyst will not have enough left over to engage with and learn from the
patient. One chapter in this volume is devoted to the analyst’s countertrans-
ference to the method of psychoanalysis.
I am interested in how the analyst holds a romantic or melancholic
embrace of his or her favored theory. Is the romantic version burdened
by idealizations? Is the melancholic version burdened by nihilism? Is the
analyst capable of holding a breadth of attitudes toward his or her the-
ory—openness to change or a capacity to stand by this theory in difficult
times?
Our relationship to theory is a particular kind of object relation. Some
analysts are more monogamous with regard to their theory, while some
love many. Some are more devout, while others are more “flexible” in their
practice. We have particular responsibilities in relation to what theory we
choose and how we practice with that theory.
I suggest two broad categories to distinguish the analyst’s relation to
theory: the romantic and the melancholic. I do not use the distinction
between romantic and melancholic to refer to the content of different
psychoanalytic theories. For example, Strenger (1989) beautifully distin-
guished between romantic and classic aspects of different psychoanalytic
theories. Kohut€(1969) discussed varying ideological traditions implicit in
Freudian theory as “guilty man,” while self-psychology was characterized
as “tragic man.” Many authors, including Hoffman (1998) and Mitchell
(1993), have addressed whether there are romantic versus tragic visions of
human �psychology emphasized in theories such as those proposed by Freud,
Ferenczi, Balint, Guntrip, Loewald, and Kohut. But, my focus is much more
on the analyst’s relationship to his or her own theory, not the romantic or
melancholic content of the theory itself.
The romantic version of an analyst’s relationship to theory emphasizes
how much the theory is helpful to the analyst in his or her understanding
of the patient. It refers to the analyst’s romance with his or her theory or