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Objects of Hope: Exploring Possibility and Limits in Psychoanalysis Steven H. Cooper Hillsdale, NJ: The Analytic Press, 2000, 321 pp.
This book addresses more current and debated psychoanalytic subjects than its title suggests. In addition to attempting to integrate different psychoanalytical theories, Cooper also includes objects-of-hope and hoped-for-objects, intimacy and solitude, the transference as an old or new object, mutual containment, influence, regression, interpretation, counter-transference expressiveness, and finally, the role that hope and limits play in psychoanalytic treatment. Despite its multiplicity of subject areas, I found the book flowed well. It is organized around the factors that lead to longer analysis and the analyst's reluctance to admit to hopes and wishes to influence the analysand.
However, Cooper's differentiation between objects-of-hope and hoped-for-objects is, unfortunately, abstract and somewhat confusing. For example, I did not, at first, understand his statement, "What I call hoped-for-objects refers to a different level of theoretical discourse that which theoreticians call a level of longing and hope within the patient's development and representational world" (21). It took me a lot of reading to understand what he means here: Objects-of-hope refer to the way the analyst and patient relate to each other. While the analyst can be a symbol of hope for the patient, the patient can also hold and contain aspects of the analyst's hopes for the patient (and for himself). This is a further elaboration of the "other" as having another subjectivity that may be different from our own. Hoped-for-objects refer to the fantasy of the analyst as the object that the patient has fantasized about and the hope that the relationship could go on forever, because the fantasy of cure is related to being with that object.
The book is divided into three parts. In part I, "Intimacy and Solitude," Cooper states that he is attempting to integrate fou r theories:...