Review: Steven H. Cooper: Objects of Hope: Exploring the Possibility and Limit in Psychoanalysis
(2002)
Review Robert F. Bornstein and Joseph M. Masling (Eds.): Empirical Studies of the Therapeutic Hour
(2002)
This paper is a response to a critique by C. Brooks Brenneis of the written account of a clinical enactment that featured countertransference dissociative effects in treatment and in supervision. The response focuses on the need to analyze power in overlapping clinical dyads, the effect of transpersonal transmission of affect states and disavowed experience, and the relation of power dynamics to transference and to meaning making.
There has been little or no research on the establishment of infant moods or the mechanisms underlying them. One reason may be our difficulty in entertaining the idea that there are affective processes in infants that have long-lasting organizing continuous effects. It is this possibility that is considered in this paper. I attempt to address the questions of how moods are created and what some of their functions are. My model of moods is that infants have long-lasting (e.g., hours, days, and even longer) mood states. Mood states are dynamically changing yet distinct assemblages of affective behaviors. Mood control processes are modified by affective input from others. Thus moods are cocreated by the interplay of active, self-organized, biorhythmic affective control processes in the infant and the effect of the emotions expressed by others on mood control processes. In recognition of the importance of Sander's thinking to this work, I have named one of these processes the Sanderian Affective Wave. Mood states organize behavior and experience over time. Critically, moods serve an anticipatory representational function by providing directionality to an infant's behavior as he >moves< into the future. Thus they provide continuity to infants' experiential life. Furthermore, moods fulfill the Janus principle of bringing the past into the future for the infant, but as a noncognitive/symbolic/linguistic process – that is, as a purely affective–memorial process. Moreover, I believe that consideration of the development of moods opens the way for thinking about dynamic conflictual emotional processes in infants. Lastly, thinking about moods has important implications for understanding the development of pathology and for therapy.
This paper emphasizes the clinical relevance of Sander's work and links it to the contemporary relational turn in psychoanalytic thought. Similarities to the original work of Sullivan and Fairbairn are noted, and broader commonalities with the new psychoanalytic developments are then developed. From this vantage point, two specific clinical advantages of Sander's approach are discussed. First, it focuses on interpersonal behavior, that is, on what people actually do with each other. Second, it explores a series of dialectics that are central to psychoanalytic process. These include those between complexity and unity, differences and continuity, and change and recurrence. Finally, a clinical vignette is presented, in which a shift in the tone of the supervisory interaction had a direct effect on the therapist – patient interaction and thus on the outcome of the therapy.