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Berkeley Psychoanalytic Society
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The Analyst’s Desire: The Ethical Foundation of Clinical Practice

Saturday, April 24, 2021 @ 10:00 am - 12:00 pm

Virtual Event Virtual Event

Speaker

Mitchell Wilson, M.D.

Dr. Wilson will present an overview and discussion of his recently published book, The Analyst’s Desire: The Ethical Foundation of Clinical Practice (Bloomsbury Academic Press). In this talk, he will unpack the following proposition: the psychoanalyst inhabits her role with a specific desire that is all the more hidden from view when it is satisfied. This claim situates the analyst as irreducibly lacking and desiring at the level of being, and has implications for many key aspects of analytic work, including the nature of analytic action and clinical impasse, the countertransference, the analyst’s ethical responsibility for the impact of her desire on the patient, and why a person would choose to work as an analyst in the first place. Part auto-theory and part clinical theory, this work rests heavily on Lacanian concepts that Dr. Wilson will illuminate by way of a comparative method with different psychoanalytic traditions (neo-Kleinian, Bionian, and Contemporary Freudian), and cognitive science (Tversky and Kahneman). He also will bring these very same concepts into question by pushing them to their logical conclusions as regards the analyst. Some discussion will be had about the recent history of psychoanalysis in San Francisco, because trends in clinical theory and practice can never be divorced from the influences of ideology that are inevitably generated at the local level.

SPEAKER

Mitchell Wilson, M.D.

Mitchell Wilson, MD is the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association. Dr. Wilson has published widely on a variety of topics that cohere around a theory of ethics, desire, and the psychoanalytic process. His paper, "The Analyst's Desire and the Problem of Narcissistic Resistances" won the JAPA Prize in 2003, and "'Nothing can be further from the truth': Lack and the Analytic Process" won the Heinz Hartman Prize in 2005. His book, The Analyst’s Desire: The Ethical Foundation of Clinical Practice, was published in 2020 by Bloomsbury Press. Most recently he has turned his attention to questions of property (bodies, land, buildings, licenses, words) and psychoanalysis. He is a Training and Supervising Analyst at the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis, and a Personal and Supervising Analyst at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California. He is in private practice and leads study groups in Berkeley, CA.

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