Equally informed by existing psychoanalytic theories, such as those by Winnicott, Bion and Mitchell, and rich clinical material, this book defines the concept of play from the perspective of clinical practice to elaborate on its application to clinical problems.

Steven H. Cooper is a training and supervising analyst at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute. He is on the faculty at the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy and the Austen Riggs Center. He is in private practice in New York.

Acknowledgments Credits List Introduction 1. Playing in the Darkness: Use of the Object and Use of the Subject 2. Toward an Ethic of Play in Psychoanalysis 3. The Limits of Intimacy and the Intimacy of Limits: Play and the Internal Bad Object 4. The Paradox of Play in Mourning 5. A Theory of the Setting: The Transformation of Unrepresented Experience and Play 6. "I Want You to Be:" Thinking about Winnicott's View of Interpretation in Ontological and Epistemological Psychoanalysis 7. Donald Winnicott's Play and Stephen Mitchell's Developmental Tilt Hypothesis Reconsidered Index