“Nothing Could Be Further From the Truth”: The Role of Lack in the Analytic Process

Wilson, Mitchell

doi:10.1177/00030651060540022401

Cited by 21 publications

(20 citation statements)

References 25 publications

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“…I use Kleinian language here because it is especially evocative of the analyst's essential position vis-à-vis his own offerings and interventions. There is a cut or lack-a breach in our relation to ourselves and what we say-that demands, in my view, great respect (Wilson 2006). As Steiner and Britton (1994) write in their paper on selected facts vs. overvalued ideas: "feelings associated with the depressive position are an inevitable part of the experience [of interpretation]" (p. 1070).…”

Section: O N T E M P O R a R Y V I E W S O F T H E A N A Ly S T ' Smentioning

confidence: 95%

Putting Practice Into Theory: Making the Training Analyst System Coherent

Wilson

2010

J Am Psychoanal Assoc

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The question of the training analysis demands a complicated set of answers that engage the issue at different levels of human organization. Historically, the training analysis has been the central feature of the tripartite model of psychoanalytic education. Internal and external pressures have burdened the training analysis and called its legitimacy into question. This problem of legitimacy amounts to a lack of coherence in the training analyst (TA) system. This lack engenders idealized fantasies of the role of the TA, in which the TA embodies special talents and attributes, and of the system that sanctions that role. This idealization is haunted by its opposite: a melancholic devaluation of psychoanalysis and a fear that it will collapse. Recent literature on the analyst's position in the psychoanalytic process emphasizes the analyst's position as decentered and conflicted. The analyst's decentered, conflicted status goes against this idealizing impulse. An attempt is made to wed analytic values, and what we know about the analyst's role in the analytic process, into a more coherent, consistent position regarding the analysis of candidates.

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Section: O N T E M P O R a R Y V I E W S O F T H E A N A Ly S T ' Smentioning

confidence: 95%

Putting Practice Into Theory: Making the Training Analyst System Coherent

Wilson

2010

J Am Psychoanal Assoc

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“…Hence, denials of lack, loss, and difference are structural tendencies of ego functioning. We might call this normal narcissism (Wilson 2010).…”

Section: The Law Of the Talion And Thementioning

confidence: 99%

“…See Rabin (1998), Tversky and Kahneman (1974), and Kahneman (2011). See also Pontalis (1981), Opatow (1997), and Wilson (2003) for psychoanalytic explorations in this area.…”

Section: The Law Of the Talion And Thementioning

confidence: 99%

“…11 When caught in the grips of a dual relation resistance, the analyst is necessarily not taking ownership of his desiring position. Because the analyst is not acknowledging his desire to himself, interpreting what the patient is doing to the analyst only solidifies the structure of the dual relation resistance (Wilson 2003).…”

Section: The Law Of the Talion And Thementioning

confidence: 99%

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Desire and Responsibility: the Ethics of Countertransference Experience

Wilson

2013

The Psychoanalytic Quarterly

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The analyst's desire expressed in impactful wishes and intentions is foundational to countertransference experience, yet undertheorized in the literature. The "wider" countertransference view, associated with neo-Kleinian theory, obscures the nature of countertransference and the analyst's contribution to it. A systematic analysis of the logic of desire as an intentional mental state is presented. Racker's (1957) talion law and Lacan's (1992) theory of the dual relation illustrate the problems that obtain with a wholesale embrace of the wider countertransference perspective. The ethical burden placed on the analyst in light of the role played by desire in countertransference is substantial. Lacan's ethics of desire and Benjamin's (2004) concept of the moral third are discussed.

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“…He will unwittingly impose and occasionally demand or insist. Thus, the analyst who excellently fulfills his function-as-analyst is the analyst who fails to fulfill his function excellently (Wilson 2006). But this is only part of the paradoxical story of excellent functioning, because manifestations of the analyst's lack are also sources of the analyst's good fortune.…”

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confidence: 99%

The Flourishing Analyst, Responsibility, and Psychoanalytic Ethics: Commentary on Kirshner

Wilson¹

2012

J Am Psychoanal Assoc

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It is an indication of this that good fortune is thought to be the same as happiness or close to it, and happiness is a kind of rational activity: it is activity going well.-Aristotle, Physics (in Ackrill 1987, p. 104) L et's try to imagine, in full Aristotelian spirit, the flourishing psychoanalyst. This is that psychoanalyst who is most excellently fulfilling his function as an analyst. Excellent (i.e., virtuous) analytic functioning is due to the analyst's rational activity. Notice that flourishing is not a state; it is an activity "going well." We would be justified in saying that the flourishing, excellently functioning analyst is a happy analyst. Good fortune, by which Aristotle means "chance" or "luck," may also be part of the flourishing analyst's happiness.These adjectives-flourishing and the like-in the context of the conditions under which the psychoanalyst actually practices, ring utterly false. After all, Freud put "happiness" in its place long ago by renaming it "common unhappiness." And Lacan, as Lewis Kirshner points out in his searching and complex paper on Lacan's Seminar VII, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, called the analyst's desire to assist patients in finding happiness a desire for "the impossible" and a "fraud." In the conventional and conscious senses of flourishing, excellence, and happiness-words that imply a self-sufficient subject-no working psychoanalyst could disagree with Freud and Lacan.And yet, were Aristotle fully informed about psychoanalytic knowledge (let us remember that he described aspects of psychic conflict is his notion of akrasia, or weakness of will), we can imagine him articulating

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“Nothing Could Be Further From the Truth”: The Role of Lack in the Analytic Process

Cited by 21 publications

References 25 publications

Putting Practice Into Theory: Making the Training Analyst System Coherent

Putting Practice Into Theory: Making the Training Analyst System Coherent

Desire and Responsibility: the Ethics of Countertransference Experience

The Flourishing Analyst, Responsibility, and Psychoanalytic Ethics: Commentary on Kirshner

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