The Analyst’s Desire: The Ethical Foundation of Clinical Practice(Psychoanalytic Horizons)

About the Book

Mitchell Wilson explores the fundamental role that lack and desire play in psychoanalytic interpretation by using a comparative method that engages different psychoanalytic traditions: Lacanian, Bionian, Kleinian, Contemporary Freudian. Investigating crucial questions Wilson asks: What is the nature of the psychoanalytic process? How are desire and counter-transference linked? What is the relationship between desire, analytic action, and psychoanalytic ethics?

Table of Contents:

Preface
Acknowledgments
1. The Voice Endures
2. If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler: The Psychoanalyst as Innkeeper
3. On the Threat of Narcissistic Closure: Lacan’s Mirror Stage, Cognitive Bias, and Narrative
4. The Analyst's Desire and the Analyst’s Resistance
5. “Nothing Could Be Further from the Truth”: Lack and the Analyst’s Attitude
6. The Analyst as Listening-Accompanist: Desire in Bion and Lacan
7. Desire and Responsibility: The Ethics of Countertransference Experience
8. The Ethical Foundation of Analytic Action
9. The Proleptic Unconscious and the Exemplary Moment in Psychoanalysis
10. “And Let Me Go On”: Desire and the Ending of Analysis
References
Index

About the Author :
Mitchell Wilson is a training and supervising analyst at the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis, USA. While in medical school at the University of California, San Francisco, he obtained a postgraduate degree in English Literature at the University of California, Berkeley, where he studied the early English novel and Lacanian theory. He has been a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar, and has served on the editorial boards of the Psychoanalytic Quarterly and the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association. Currently, he is Editor-in-Chief of JAPA.

Review :
Wilson generously invites us into his own psychic world in a way that feels evocative of many of the personal stories of Freud’s own interpersonal web of relationships that are woven into The Interpretation of Dreams. […] Concise and compelling clinical examples flesh out instances in which both Wilson and his patients are brought up short by words that suddenly take on new meaning, rendering the entire relationship between them in a new light. These are the kinds of examples that stay with a reader, illuminating the quiet power of seemingly insignificant or everyday exchanges. […] This book is a must-read for candidates in analytic training and a welcome read for practicing analysts. […] It situates us in the present theoretical moment, expands our understanding of the ethical foundation of analytic work, and opens new vistas onto analytic practice and technique. It was an honor to read Mitchell Wilson’s book, written in a beautifully clear language and full of engaging and trenchant moments drawn from analytic encounters and theoretical reflections. This book is for the psychoanalysts of the world as well as a larger audience, especially as it explores fundamental questions of language, exchange, counter-transference, and the key question of how a sense of an open futurity may come about. In this compellingly readable work, Mitchell Wilson combines brilliant erudition, incisive personal sensitivity, and gorgeous writing to call to life a strong reading of the analyst’s own desire, desire born in inevitable lack, as shaping the psychoanalytic venture. Discerning what is of value while dispelling the rigidities and obscurities of much prior anglophone and francophone analytic literature, Wilson opens fresh vistas into the experience, action, and ethics of analytic, and thus implicitly the human, engagement. Combining the immediacy of personal memoir and clinical unfoldings brought to life with profound questioning, this engaging volume is like a docent’s tour by a significant leader in contemporary analytic thought. Start reading it; you won’t stop. Wilson’s enthusiastic and challenging Lacanian perspective on the eclectic field of contemporary psychoanalysis illuminates what is inspiring as well as daunting in our daily practice—confronting our own desire—and so sheds new light on the inevitable dialectic between missing and meeting that is the creative condition of our work. Unbeholden to orthodoxy, The Analyst’s Desire interweaves practical reflections on the analyst’s participation with critical analysis of current theory. A pleasure to read, the writer’s voice—as fresh and honest as it is wise and erudite—matches the quality of his thinking. Someone had to write this book. What becomes quickly obvious is that only Mitchell Wilson could have done so, and for the very reasons he lays out in this treasure of a volume. ... His work is unpretentious, intimate, unabashed, floridly creative, and human in the best sense of that word.