By Steven Cooper (USA)
In my new book, The Analyst’s Experience of the Depressive Position: The Melancholic Errand of Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 2016), I explore the depressive position, a subject previously applied more exclusively to patients and less frequently to psychoanalysts. I look into the pleasures and warmth of helping patients bear what appears unbearable, as well as the poignant experiences of limitation, incompleteness, and repetition as substantial and vital parts of clinical work. I describe a seam in clinical work in which the analyst is always trying to find and re-find a position from which we can help patients to work with these experiences.
Steven H. Cooper, PhD
875 Massachusetts Avenue, Suite 54
Cambridge, MA 02139 USA
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