Steven Cooper, Ph.D.

Steven Cooper is a Training and Supervising Analyst at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute. He is a Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Columbia University.  He is an Adjunct Clinical Professor at New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis. He currently maintains a full time practice in New York. He served as Joint Editor-in-Chief of Psychoanalytic Dialogues from 2007-2012 and is now Chief Editor Emeritus. He has also served on multiple terms on the editorial boards of The International Journal of Psychoanalysis and The Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association and is a Consulting Editor for Contemporary Psychoanalysis In 1989, he won the JAPA prize for best paper of the year.

Dr Cooper is the author of four books in psychoanalysis. "Objects of Hope: Exploring Possibility and Limit in Psychoanalysis," published by The Analytic Press in 2000. "A Disturbance in the Field: Essays in Transference-Countertransference" published by Routledge Press in 2010. “The Melancholic Errand of Psychoanalysis: Exploring the Analyst’s Relationship to the Depressive Position published in 2016 by Routledge Press and is now translated into Italian by Routledge. His new book, “Playing and Becoming in Psychoanalysis” was published in October, 2023.

Cooper, S. H. (2023) Playing and Becoming in Psychoanalysis. London/New York: Routledge

Cooper, S.H. (2023) The play of mourning. J. Amer. Psychoanal. Assn. 71: 61-82.

Cooper, S. H. (2022) The limits of intimacy and the intimacy of limit: Play and its relation to the bad object. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 70: 241-261.

Cooper, S. H. (2022) Shared catastrophe, resistance, and learning in the countertransference. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 91(1):39-61.

Cooper, S. H. (2022) The activity of neutrality. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 91(2):355-369.

Cooper, S. H. (2021) Donald Winnicott and Stephen Mitchell’s Developmental Tilt Hypothesis Reconsidered. Psychoanalytic Dialogues. 31:3, 355-370.

Cooper, S. H. (2021) Toward an Ethic of Play. Psychoanalytic Quarterly. 90: 373-397.

Cooper, S.H. (2018). Playing in the Darkness: Use of the Object and Use of the Subject. J. Amer. Psychoanal. Assn., 66(4):743-765. 

Cooper, S.H. (2015). Clinical Theory at the Border(s): Emerging and Unintended Crossings in the Development of Clinical Theory. Int. J. Psycho-Anal., 96(2):273-292.

Cooper, S.H. (2015). Reflections on the Analyst’s “Good Enough” Capacity to Bear Disappointment, with Special Attention to Repetition. J. Amer. Psychoanal. Assn., 63(6):1193-1213.

Cooper, S.H. (2014). The Things We Carry: Finding/Creating the Object and the Analyst’s Self-Reflective Participation. Psychoanal. Dial., 24(6):621-636.

1989: Best Paper Prize of the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association