The Analyst’s Experience of the Depressive Position: The Melancholic Errand of Psychoanalysis

185 Pages·2016·1.24 MB·English

by  Steven H. Cooper

’
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’sexperienceofthe depressivepositionintheanalytic
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
oftheanalyst’sparticipationandresistancetohelpingpatientsholdsomeofthe
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.

StevenH.Cooperisapsychoanalystandteacherwellknowninternationallyfor

his interest in integrating independent, Kleinian and relational thinking in his
clinical work and writing. A training and supervising analyst at the Boston
Psychoanalytic SocietyandInstitute, heisalso Associate Professor inPsychiatry

at Harvard Medical School and Co-Chief Editor Emeritus at Psychoanalytic
Dialogues.
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’
The Analyst s Experience of the

Depressive Position

The melancholic errand of psychoanalysis

Steven H. Cooper
Firstpublished2016
byRoutledge
2ParkSquare,MiltonPark,Abingdon,OxonOX144RN
andbyRoutledge
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©2016StevenH.Cooper
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assertedbyhiminaccordancewithsections77and78oftheCopyright,

DesignsandPatentsAct1988.
Allrightsreserved.Nopartofthisbookmaybereprintedorreproducedor
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BritishLibraryCataloguinginPublicationData
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Names:Cooper,StevenH.,1951-,author.
Title:Theanalyst’sexperienceofthedepressiveposition:themelancholic
errandofpsychoanalysis/StevenH.Cooper.
Description:London;NewYork:Routledge,2016.|Includesbibliographical
referencesandindex.
Identifiers:LCCN2015032541|ISBN9781138844100(hardback)|ISBN

9781138844131(pbk.)|ISBN9781315730615(ebook)

Subjects:|MESH:Countertransference(Psychology)|Depression--psychology.|
Professional-PatientRelations.|PsychoanalyticTherapy.|Unconscious
(Psychology)
Classification:LCCRC537|NLMWM62|DDC616.85/270651--dc23

LCrecordavailableathttp://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)
TypesetinSabon
byTaylor&FrancisBooks
Dedication: To Abraham and Leon
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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-
analysisandthenatureoftheanalyst’srelationshiptothedepressivepositionin
clinical work.
Iwanttothanksomanyofmypatients, thosewhomIhavehelpedandthose
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
understandisheldinthemelancholicembraceofincompletenessandlimitation.
I begin with the notion that part of the art of psychoanalysis involves working
intheshadowofincompletenessandthisiswherewefindsomethingusefuland

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 analysisat apointin his careerwhen heisappreciating that itwillnot
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’sanalysisdoesmakememoreconsciousoftheneedtodiscoverthis

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.