Steve Patrick: Steven Cooper Fall Workshop Review

Objects of Hope: Exploring Possibility and Limit in Psychoanalysis

Steven Cooper, Ph.D.
Reviewed by
Steve Patrick, Psy.D.

DSPP was pleased to have Dr. Steven Cooper present at the DSPP Fall Workshop on November 4, 2000. The title for the workshop was taken from Dr. Cooper’s recently released book of the same title. Dr. Karen Strupp, a psychologist in private practice from Houston who is currently a candidate in the Houston-Galveston Psychoanalytic Institute, joined him. She presented a case study during the afternoon part of the workshop, which Dr. Cooper and the audience commented on.

Dr. Cooper opened the morning session with a humorous reference to the movie Analyze This in which Billy Crystal played a psychiatrist who, after becoming bored with a particular patient’s meanings and groaning, yells at her to “Get a life!” Dr. Cooper did not, of course, espouse this particular technique of therapeutic dialogue. However, he did note that, in his view, a central purpose of our profession consists of “promoting psychic possibility,” (i.e., getting a life, as it were). Further, he stated, “I think one of the impossible aspects of our work is how to integrate our hopes and their accompanying therapeutic or psychic nudging with a sense of respect for our patient’s adaptation to their psychic conflicts.” He likened this difficult integration to the tension between intimacy and restraint, which he described as “another impossible integration.”

He also alluded to Ogden’s notion of reverie and how it extends to the realm of hope in that therapists need to “translate their reveries into understandings about how a patient and therapist can hope more fruitfully.” Still further, he pointed out that this realm of reverie can tell us about the ‘imagined real’ (Buber), that is, “our hopes help us imagine psychically what is being left out through defense and conflict, what is being defensively dwelled on through dominant metaphors or experience that foreclose and truncate other experiences.”

Dr. Cooper discussed how therapists’ hopes are varied and exist at multiple levels of conscious and unconscious experience. He suggested that a way to elucidate these hopes held by the therapist is to “take a look at [his/her own] fantasies about what might happen, what is and is not happening as an inroad to understanding a number of aspects of the intrapsychic and interpersonal dynamics.” Cooper suggested that therapists have been struggling to find a way to incorporate hope into the notion of therapeutic attitude, that is, finding a way to have ‘attitude’ in their therapeutic attitude. “What I mean by attitude relates to the powerful dimension to our interventions that moves unconsciously to preserve our hope for the analytic process.”

Dr. Cooper thinks of all psychoanalytic theories as “logics of hope,” that is, that theories hold our hope:

One of the most exciting things about psychoanalytic theory of all kinds is its deep appreciation of how the most hopeful aspects of human growth frequently entail acceptance of the destructive elements of our inner lives; objects of hope are often objects of envy, disappointment, rivalry, and frustration. Psychoanalytic theory equips us with the ability to understand how much consciously hopeful stances involve deep pockets of unconscious dread. Indeed, dread itself usually has less to do with anticipation than it does with what has already occurred. Conversely, sometimes we learn that masochism and self-reproach involve unconscious ways of preserving hoped for responses from loved others. Yet because of this sophisticated approach to the concept of hope, psychoanalysts have been wary of talking more about therapists’ conscious experiences of hope and wish for their patients.

Dr. Cooper referred to Freud’s work as a whole as offering an ambitious (hopeful) message in terms of its pursuit of the comprehension of all of mental life. Cooper stated that since Freud’s initial assertions about psychic events, all psychoanalytic theories have ambitiously asserted in one way or another that change is possible. Cooper added that, “To hope more fruitfully is another way of saying that the therapist is trying to learn as much as possible about what the patient wants, what the patient is afraid of, how the patient protects himself, and the like. The therapist attempts to find ways to shift the patient’s conscious and unconscious hopes both in the immediacy of engagement and through the developmental history of the patient, born of loving and hostile feelings, gratification and disappointment, into a realm of playful dialogue and observation. His own hopes are constantly influenced by the patient and influence the progress of this effort.”

Dr. Cooper also described a particular way of using humor that he termed “perverse interpretation and support.” He said these are “interpretive moments involving the analyst’s attempt to lend an ironic lens on the patient’s need to cling to defensive positions which serve to mitigate anxiety, guilt or painful affect. These ironic interventions address the embeddedness of the patient’s position in a way that can be deconstructed as involving aspects of defense interpretation and transference/countertransference enactment.” Cooper went on to say that these perverse interpretations appear spontaneously in his work with patients, usually as a result of exhaustion or frustration during times when the work becomes plodding in nature. But he doesn’t regret these moments and, instead, sees them as inevitable aspects of clinical work, which can lead to helpful exploration of the patient’s conflicts within the interpersonal context of the analytic dyad. Cooper also stated that his humor is “always aimed toward interpreting but probably also expressing a level of impatience or unrealized hope about how something might change.”

For the afternoon portion of the workshop, Dr. Karen Strupp presented a vignette of a patient she has been treating in analysis for the past two years. Questions were invited from the audience, as well as associations to the clinical material presented in the vignette. The audience participated readily in the discussion.

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