Past Event

"The Analyst's Desire:
The Ethical Foundation of Clinical Practice"

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.


Zoom
link forthcoming

Saturday, April 24, 2021

10:00 AM - 12:00 PM


MitchellMitchell 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.


Future Events

Coming soon


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Saturday, April 15, 2023

"Psychoanalysis and Opera: Rejoining the Verbal and Non-Verbal"
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Lee Rather, Ph.D.,


Saturday, January 21, 2023

""What Should I Call You? Pronouns and the Scene of Address""
Judith Butler, Ph.D.


Saturday, December 3, 2022

"Link Theory and Practice: The Irreducible Effects of Presence"
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Saturday, October 1, 2022

"The Structure and Function of Part Objects"
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Saturday, April 30, 2022

"Psychoanalysis: the Contemporary Scene from an Editor's View"
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Saturday, February 5, 2022

"Working Backwards: "Backwards Causation"and the Temporality of the Unconscious in Pre-Freudian Dream Theory"
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Saturday, December 4, 2021

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Saturday, October 9, 2021

"Love, Hate and Knowledge: the Analyst’s Aesthetic Conflict"
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Saturday, April 24, 2021

"The Analyst's Desire: The Ethical Foundation of Clinical Practice"
Mitchell Wilson, M.D.


Saturday, February 27, 2021

"Freud’s Nietzsche: Eternal Return, Symptomatic Acts and the Gay Apophrades"
Dany Nobus


Saturday, December 12, 2020

"What's uncanny in the Unheimliche?"
Sergio Benvenuto, Ph.D.


Saturday, October 31, 2020

"Roads to the Unconscious: Some Parallels and Divergences between Psychoanalysis and the Writing of Poetry"
John Hart,
Helen Schoenhals Hart,


Saturday, October 10, 2020

"Trans Realism: Psychoanalysis and the Trans Experience"
Patricia Gherovici, Ph.D.,
Grace Lavery, Ph.D.,


Saturday, April 4, 2020

"*POSTPONED* What's uncanny in the Unheimliche?"
Sergio Benvenuto, Ph.D.


Saturday, March 21, 2020

"*POSTPONED* Trans Realism, Psychoanalytic Practice, and the Rhetoric of Technique"
Grace Lavery, Ph.D.


Saturday, January 25, 2020

"Creativity and the Erotic Dimensions of the Analytic Field"
Dianne Elise, Ph.D.


Saturday, November 23, 2019

"Mama, Mnemo - Reading Kristeva with Montale"
Benjamin Davidson, Ph.D.


Saturday, October 12, 2019

"The Maternal: Psychoanalysis, Literature and Film"
Claire Kahane, Ph.D.,
Marilyn Fabe, Ph.D.,


Saturday, April 13, 2019

"Light Rooms: Medium, Mourning and Mania"
Elizabeth Abel, Ph.D.


Saturday, January 26, 2019

"From Freud's Mourning to Mourning Freud"
Madelon Sprengnether, Ph.D.


Saturday, December 1, 2018

"Group Discussion: The Place of the Nonrepresentational and the Nonverbal in Psychoanalysis"
Margot Beattie, Ph.D.,
Israel Katz, MD,


Saturday, October 20, 2018

"Freud's Seduction: Psychoanalysis and California"
Fernando Castrillon, Psy.D.


Saturday, March 3, 2018

"Trans Psychoanalysis and Livable Embodiments"
Patricia Gherovici, Ph.D.


Saturday, January 27, 2018

"The Political Unconscious in Perilous Times"
Judith Butler, Ph.D.,
Lance Dodes, M.D.,
Jill Gentile, Ph.D.


Saturday, October 28, 2017

"Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg: The Dream World of Wagner"
Steven H. Golderg, MD,
Jeanne C. Harasemovitch, LCSW,


Saturday, October 7, 2017

"Incandescent Alphabets: Language and Art in Psychosis"
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Saturday, May 20, 2017

"Homeland (In)Security: How Feminine Law Might Rescue Democracy, Truth and Free Speech"
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Sunday, March 26, 2017

"Enigmatic Mechanisms: Some Reflections on Love, Affect, and Identification in Freud"
Marcus Coelen, Ph.D


Saturday, March 18, 2017

"Refashioning Jouissance/Enjoyment for the Age of the Imaginary"
Juliet Flower MacCannell, Ph.D.


Saturday, January 28, 2017

"Freud and the Frankfurt School"
Martin E. Jay, Ph.D.


Saturday, October 29, 2016

"Thinking About The Future"
Christopher Bollas, Ph.D.


Saturday, September 24, 2016

"Death Drive Dialogue #2"
Henry Markman, MD,
Israel Katz, MD,


Saturday, May 21, 2016

"Psychoanalytic Knowledge"
Peter Hobson, Ph.D.


Saturday, April 23, 2016

"The Alterability of the Memory Trace"
Rosaura Martinez, Ph.D.


Saturday, April 2, 2016

"Conversion Disorder: Freud, religious transformation, Foucault and Agamben"
Jamieson Webster, Ph.D.


Saturday, March 26, 2016

"Surviving Terror: An Interview with Ernst Federn"
Helen Schoenhals Hart, Dr.med.


Saturday, October 17, 2015

"Rosa Luxemburg and Marilyn Monroe: Women in Depressed Times"
Jacqueline Rose


Saturday, May 9, 2015

"Keeping the Other Alive: Counter-trends to the Death Drive"
Judith Butler, Ph.D.


Monday, March 30, 2015

"Cultivating the Foreigner Within: Julia Kristeva and Hannah Arendt on Uncanny Art and Human Relations in the Contemporary World"
Elaine Miller, Ph.D.


Saturday, January 31, 2015

"Enduring Inequality: Racism in America"
Jeffrey Prager, Ph.D.



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