The Analyst's Experience of the Depressive Position: The Melancholic Errand of Psychoanalysisexplores a subject matter previously applied more exclusively to patients, but rarely to psychoanalysts. Cooper probes the analyst's experience of the depressive position in the analytic situation.

Steven H. Cooper is a psychoanalyst and teacher well known internationally for his interest in integrating independent, Kleinian and relational thinking in his clinical work and writing. A training and supervising analyst at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, he is also Associate Professor in Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and Co-Chief Editor Emeritus at Psychoanalytic Dialogues.

Section I. THEORETICAL BACKGROUND

Chapter 1 Ruin and Beauty I: Some Basic Assumptions and Models of the Analyst's

Relationship to the Depressive Position

Chapter 2 Ruin and Beauty II: The Analyst's Experience and Resistance to Grief and

Sense of Limitation in the Analytic Process

Section II. CLINICAL PROCESS

Chapter 3 The Melancholic Errand of Psychoanalysis: Exploring the Analyst's "Good Enough" Experiences of Repetition

Chapter 4 Exploring a Patient's Shift from Relative Silence to Verbal Expressiveness: Observations on an Element of the Analyst's Participation

Chapter 5 The Analyst's Relationship to the Psychoanalytic Process

Chapter 6 The Things We Carry: Finding/Creating the Object

and the Analyst's Self-Reflective Participation

Chapter 7 Revisiting the Analyst as Old and New Object: The Analyst's Failures and the Therapeutic Action of Psychoanalysis

Section III. SOME BROADER IMPLICATIONS

Chapter 8 Reflections on the Aesthetics of the Psychic Boundary Concept: Or, Why Refer to Sexual Misconduct with Patients as Boundary Violation?

Chapter 9 The Theorist as an Unconscious Participant: Emerging and Unintended Crossings in a Post-Pluralistic Psychoanalysis