The Analyst's Desire - (Psychoanalytic Horizons) by Mitchell Wilson (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

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?

Review Quotes

"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." --Psychoanalytic Quarterly

"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." --Judith Butler, Maxine Elliot Professor of Comparative Literature, University of California, Berkeley, USA, and author of The Force of Nonviolence: The Ethical in the Political (2020)

"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." --Warren S. Poland, MD, Psychoanalyst and author of Intimacy and Separateness in Psychoanalysis (2017)

"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." --Jessica Benjamin, author of Beyond Doer and Done To: Recognition Theory, Intersubjectivity and the Third (2017)

"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." --Fort da