2024 Visiting Professor Steven H. Cooper, Ph.D.

The MICHIGAN PSYCHOANALYTIC SOCIETY is pleased to present 

The MICHIGAN PSYCHOANALYTIC INSTITUTE’S

37^th ANNUAL VISITING PROFESSOR

Steven H. Cooper, PhD 

Discussant: Hannah Wallerstein, Ph.D.

GUARDIAN OF THE SETTING: WHAT IS NEUTRALITY IN AN ONTOLOGICAL PSYCHOANALYSIS

March 23, 2024

2:00 – 4:00 PM (Eastern time)

Michigan Psychoanalytic Institute, 32841 Middlebelt Road, Farmington Hills  

or Join Meeting  https://zoom.us/my/michiganpsychoanalysis 

This meeting is free to all attendees.

2 CME and CE Credit Hours($25 per credit hour for non-MPS members).

*** No Partial Credit Given. You must arrive within 10 minutes of the start time and stay until 10 minutes of the end time to receive credit. Non-MPS members should call or email Monica Evans at 248-851-3380, mevans@mpi-mps.org to arrange to receive credits.  

About the presenter and discussant:

Steven H. Cooper, Ph.D. is a training and supervising analyst at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute and the Columbia Center for Psychoanalysis. He is a clinical professor of psychiatry at Columbia University and on the faculty at NYU 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 served 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. He is the author of over one hundred articles and four books in psychoanalysis, the newest titled, Playing and Becoming in Psychoanalysis. 

Hannah Wallerstein, PhD, FABP is a psychologist and psychoanalyst in private practice in Ann Arbor, MI. She serves as faculty at the Michigan Psychoanalytic Institute, adjunct faculty at the Austen Riggs Center, clinical supervisor for the CCNY Doctoral program, and on the editorial boards of The Psychoanalytic Quarterly and The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child. Hannah has published on gender identity and transgender phenomena, psychosis and historical trauma, and most recently the collapse between biology and ontology in psychoanalytic thinking on the body.   

Practice Gap/Need and Course Description:

In a series of papers, the author has discussed the analyst’s neutrality as an activity: a constantly moving position and an always-evolving process characterized by the analyst’s thinking and curiosity about how to help the patient better know and become himself. In this paper, the author extends some ideas about the activity of neutrality to include the ways that we help patients to hold paradoxical realities intrinsic to transference and play in analytic work. He suggests that Winnicott’s guardianship of the setting for the emergence of playing and Bion’s guardianship of the setting to facilitate reverie, were their own de facto expressions of the need for neutrality within the ontological thread of analysis. Both Winnicott and Bion were concerned about the ways that we interfere with the emergence of playing and reverie. The author suggests that understanding and being are two dimensions of the analytic process that work in concert with each other in analytic process. Neutrality often works quietly in spaces between epistemological and ontological approaches to clinical psychoanalysis. 

After attending this presentation, participants will be able to:

1.    Link their conceptions of analytic neutrality to the patient’s play and reverie in the analysis.

2.    Demonstrate awareness of ways that they may facilitate or interfere with the emergence of reverie and play in the analytic process.   

PHYSICIANS: This activity has been planned and implemented in accordance with the accreditation requirements and policies of the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education (ACCME) through the joint providership of American Psychoanalytic Association and Michigan Psychoanalytic Society. The American Psychoanalytic Association is accredited by the ACCME to provide continuing medical education for physicians. The American Psychoanalytic Association designates this Live Activity for a maximum of 2 AMA PRA Category 1 Credit(s)™. Physicians should claim only the credit commensurate with the extent of their participation in the activity. IMPORTANT DISCLOSURE INFORMATION FOR ALL LEARNERS: None of the planners and presenters for this educational activity have relevant financial relationship(s)* to disclose with ineligible companies whose primary business is producing, marketing, selling, re-selling, or distributing healthcare products used by or on patients.*Financial relationships are relevant if the educational content an individual can control is related to the business lines or products of the ineligible company. Updated July 2021 

PSYCHOLOGISTS: The Michigan Psychoanalytic Society is approved by the American Psychological Association to sponsor continuing education for psychologists. The Michigan Psychoanalytic Society maintains responsibility for this program and its content. 

SOCIAL WORKERS: The Michigan Psychoanalytic Society is an approved provider with the Michigan Social Work Continuing Education Collaborative. The views of the speakers do not necessarily represent the views of the Michigan Psychoanalytic Society.

Please call or email Monica Evans at 248-851-3380, mevans@mpi-mps.org to arrange to receive credits.  

Registration: