You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
In his article, Mitchell Wilson reaches outside the usual North American references to less well-known European ideas. Besides his use of Lacanian theory, his writing about lack appears to resonate with André, Green's idea of a void, a concept that can profoundly change one's clinical perspective (Reed 2001, 2003; Reed and Baudry 2005). Moreover, he happily advocates an analytic attitude in which the analyst is aware of his or her limitations and his or her contribution to the analytic process, and in which the analyst is cognizant of the way theory can easily become belief, and exploration of an individual's unconscious an exercise in verification of that belief. I tend to agree with these clinical propositions and applaud Wilson's reaching beyond our familiar references. It was therefore a surprise, as I continued to read his article, to find myself becoming quite uncomfortable with it. I was puzzled by my reaction and at a loss about what to say.
It seemed, on reflection, that Wilson's text had an additional register, beyond its surface intent, and that this more silent register was causing me considerable discomfort. Indeed, my loss about what to say suggested to me that Wilson's text was evoking in me a sense of my own lack. I began to wonder whether these feelings could be related to Wilson's work with Evan. After all, parallelism phenomena are not limited to the supervisory relationship (Arlow 1960), but have been shown to occur in the relationship set up between a reader and a literary text (Reed 1982), so why not in a paper that attempts to use theory to work out a countertransference? My clinical experience has taught me the truth of many analysts' contention over the years that the analyst's failure to recognize transference and countertransference