Analyst’s Desire

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.

• PrefaceAcknowledgments1. The Voice Endures2. If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler: The Psychoanalyst as Innkeeper3. On the Threat of Narcissistic Closure: Lacan’s Mirror Stage, Cognitive Bias, and Narrative4. The Analyst's Desire and the Analyst’s Resistance5. “Nothing Could Be Further from the Truth”: Lack and the Analyst’s Attitude6. The Analyst as Listening-Accompanist: Desire in Bion and Lacan7. Desire and Responsibility: The Ethics of Countertransference Experience8. The Ethical Foundation of Analytic Action9. The Proleptic Unconscious and the Exemplary Moment in Psychoanalysis10. “And Let Me Go On”: Desire and the Ending of AnalysisReferencesIndex

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.