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

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 rarely 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 creative 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, provocative and long overdue topic relevant to psychoanalysts, psycho-dynamically oriented psychotherapists, as well as students and teachers of both psychoanalysis and psychodynamic psychotherapy. 1. Ruin and beauty I : some basic assumptions and models of the analyst's relationship to the depressive position -- 2. Ruin and beauty II : the analyst's experience and resistance to grief and sense of limitation in the analytic process -- 3. The melancholic errand of psychoanalysis : exploring the analyst's 'good enough' experiences of repetition -- 4. Exploring a patient's shift from relative silence to verbal expressiveness : observations on an element of the analyst's participation -- 5. The analyst's object relationship to the psychoanalytic process -- 6. The things we carry : finding/creating the object and the analyst's self-reflective participation -- 7. Revisiting the analyst as old and new object : the analyst's failures and the therapeutic action of psychoanalysis -- 8. Reflections on the aesthetics of the psychic boundary concept : uses and misuses -- 9. The theorist as an unconscious participant : emerging and unintended crossings in a post-pluralistic psychoanalysis