Winnicott brilliantly grasped the child’s nuisance-making as a bid for assurance of the parent’s reliability. Some adult patients continue their patterns of nuisance-making in ways that can be annoying to others, including the analyst. Dr. Cooper explores the work that the analyst must do on behalf of his patient to transform countertransference annoyance into meaningful interpretive responsiveness. This work requires the analyst to metabolize the affects expressed that are challenging for the patient to contain. Together, patient and analyst live for periods of time in a nuisance-making climate, one that is demanding for both patient and analyst.

Steven H. Cooper, PhD, is a Training and Supervising Analyst at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute and the Columbia Univ. Psychoanalytic Center. He holds Clinical Professorships at Columbia P&S and at New York Univ. Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis. He has recently been the Visiting Erik Erikson Senior Scholar at the Austen Riggs Center. Dr Cooper is the author or editor of eight books in psychoanalysis. His most recent books: Playing and Becoming in Psychoanalysis, (2023) and Psychoanalysis in Play: Expanding Psychoanalytic Concepts from a Play Perspective, (2025); and Winnicott’s Letter to Bion: Playing and Dreaming and Beyond, co-edited with Christopher Lovett (2025).

Matthew Shaw, PhD, is an adult, child and adolescent psychoanalyst, teaches at the Yale Univ. School of Medicine and is a training and supervising analyst at the Western New England Institute for Psychoanalysis in New Haven, CT, where he chairs the child and adolescent training program. He has published broadly, including a book on Hans Loewald. He gave the plenary at the Association for Child Psychoanalysis and the Beata Rank Lecture at the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute.