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“wow, man. I've never heard you play that before,” writes
Whitney Balliett, long-time jazz critic for The New Yorker, here quoted by Mitchell Wilson (p. 113), about the drummer Big Sid Catlett.
Similarly, when reading The Analyst s Desire the reader immediately realizes that the author, as is mostly said about novelists, has a “voice.” By this expression we usually mean someone who possesses “a way of engaging rhythm, timing, and accent” in a personal, original, distinct, vivid, and direct writing style—that “captures.” What? Of course, the reader's desire, caught up in the erotic game of unveiling that is generated in the Barthesian game between plaisir (the expected) and jouissance (the unexpected). Mitchell Wilson's style is simple and direct, but does not renounce a certain pleasant sophistication. It is not for nothing that he uses words like “strangerness,” Nebenmensch, “vagaries,” “gyroscopic,” “futural,” “opprobrium,” ressentiment, poesis, “unbeknownst,” chutzpah, “win-someness,” etc.
The experience of reading this book, chapter after chapter, is that of an intimate conversation: passionate, engaging, and smooth. Even before the specific content, one feels its musical structure. There are moments of agreement and others of dissonance, but they are always harmoniously inserted in the same coherent score, that is, always functional to an alternating game of convergence and divergence between author and reader that allows for development in both. After all, it is but the dance of mutual
recognition that is danced in any conversation. Whether it is a “happy” conversation is the primary purpose of analysis. When it is, like a successful piece of music it has an effect on us that goes beyond words and expresses what words cannot directly say.
First of all, I would say, Wilson's prose expresses the feeling of a marvelous enduring vitality of psychoanalysis and the awareness of its irreducible strength (but also fragility) in saying something true a