Psychoanalysis in Play

Expanding Psychoanalytic Concepts from a Play Perspective

Steven H. Cooper

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN:
  9781040371183
• Topic: Psychology
• Index: Psychology

In this book, Steven H. Cooper expands on his thinking of psychoanalysis as a form of play and the implications of this for theory and clinical practice.

The most important activities of the analyst as a usable object for the patient have to do with finding the patient's creative elements of self. Cooper illuminates this process of finding within both patient and analyst. He illuminates how play processes occur in relation to such concepts as defense, temporality, and neutrality within the analytic situation. Along the way, he theorizes a complex but usable clinical relationship between becoming and knowing in psychoanalytic work.

With rich clinical vignettes and a fresh take on the nature and practice of psychoanalysis, this book is key reading for all psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Living an Experience of Defense: Exploring Defensive Process within the Play Framework
• 2 The Activity of Neutrality
• 3 Playing, Paradox, and Analytic Activity between Knowing and Being
• 4 Winnicott’s Paradox of Being with and without Memory and Desire: Notes on a Letter from Winnicott to Bion
• 5 Play and Temporality in Psychoanalysis: A Close Reading of “Playing, Creativity, and the Search for the Self” in Winnicott’s Playing and Reality
• 6 Playing in Time: Some Reflections on Temporality in the Analytic Setting
• 7 The Virtual Oedipal Citadel: Varieties of Isolation, Oedipal Conflict, and Cover-Up
• 8 “Being Careful in Only a Perverse Way”: The Use of Aesthetic Experience in Psychoanalytic Work
• Index