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

Building on Winnicott's theory of play, this book defines the concept of play from the perspective of clinical practice, elaborating on its application to clinical problems.
Although Winnicott's theory of play constitutes a radical understanding of the intersubjectivity of therapy, Cooper contends, there remains a need to explore the significance of play to the enactment of transference-countertransference. Among several ideas, this book considers how to help patients as they navigate debilitating internal object relations, supporting them to engage with "bad objects" in alternatively playful ways. In addition, throughout the book, Cooper develops an ethic of play that can support the analyst to find "ventilated spaces" of their own, whereby they can reflect on transference-countertransference. Rather than being hindered by the limits of the therapeutic setting, this book explores how possibilities for play can develop out of these very constraints, ultimately providing a fulsome exploration of the concept without eviscerating its magic.
With a broad theoretical base, and a wide definition of play, this book will appeal to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists wanting to understand how play functions within and can transform their clinical practice.