CANCELED: The Limits of Intimacy and the Intimacy of Limits in Psychoanalytic Work

2 CE credits for Licensed Psychoanalysts and Social Workers

Practitioners and General Public: $40  |  Students: $10

Steven Cooper will explore how internal bad objects are released (Fairbairn’s term) in the process of analytic work. He will focus on the analyst’s countertransference experience of being perceived as bad, especially when that experience seems to be approaching the limit of what is bearable for the analyst, and he will explore how the analyst, in experiencing his or her own limits for bearing the patient’s “badness,” can contribute to the patient’s emotional growth.

Steven Cooper, PhD, is a training and supervising analyst at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute. He is an associate professor of psychology in psychiatry (part-time) at Cambridge Health Alliance, Harvard Medical School. He served as joint editor-in-chief of Psychoanalytic Dialogues from 2007 to 2012. He is currently on the editorial boards of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, Contemporary Psychoanalysis, and Psychoanalytic Dialogues. Dr. Cooper is the author of three books and numerous articles on psychoanalysis. His books include Objects of Hope: Exploring Possibility and Limit in Psychoanalysis (Analytic Press, 2000), A Disturbance in the Field: Essays in Transference-Countertransference (Routledge, 2010), and The Melancholic Errand of Psychoanalysis: Exploring the Analyst’s Relationship to the Depressive Position (Routledge, 2016), in both English and Italian editions. He is an occasional commentator on film and popular culture on the Boston NPR station.