Practitioners and General Public: $40  |  Students: Free

This presentation will address the psychoanalyst’s basic desiring position, a topic that within the history of analytic theory (with the exception of Lacan) has been left at the doorstep of the analyst’s office. Without desire as the key feature of the analyst’s activity, important questions regarding the countertransference, the structure of clinical impasses, and the analyst’s ethical responsibility for the other cannot be adequately formulated, let alone convincingly answered.

Mitchell Wilson, MD, is the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association.  He has published widely on a variety of topics that cohere around a theory of ethics, desire, and the psychoanalytic process.  His book The Analyst’s Desire: The Ethical Foundation of Clinical Practice was published in 2020 by Bloomsbury Press.  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.