Boston Psychoanalytic Society & Institute

This event addresses: Play

In this Academic Lecture, Steven Cooper explores how psychoanalysis is a form of play. With adult patients, play helps unsymbolized experience find expression through words. Winnicott’s theory of play, first described as relevant to children, marked a radical expansion of the intersubjective component of therapeutic action for all therapeutic work. Through the use of clinical examples, Dr. Cooper elaborates an application of this play concept to forms of transference-countertransference engagement and enactment. He explores how the emergence of play in clinical process disrupts and marks shifts in transference-countertransference, and examines how play is nearly always inextricably related to mourning attachments of various kinds. Finally, Dr. Cooper describes how limits in the therapeutic encounter are a representation of reality that is constitutive of play itself. This is an underemphasized but essential feature of Winnicott’s emphasis on psychoanalysis as a very particular and important form of playing.