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Someone had to write this book. What becomes quickly obvious is that only Mitchell Wilson could have done so, and for the very reasons he lays out in this treasure of a volume. Wilson, a training and supervising analyst at the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis, and the Editor-in-Chief of JAPA, has assembled a truly resplendent tome, replete with intense theoretical deliberations borne from decades' worth of reading and study, combined with personal vignettes and cultural considerations that speak directly to the clinical encounter.
The fate of psychoanalysis, as of late, would seem to bar the possibility of a book of this sort. Various theoretical schools and lineages have developed such extensive, elaborate, and hermetically sealed idiolects that any real trans-field conversation seems doomed from the outset. While it may seem that we are all speaking of the same thing when we mention transference, for example, any persistent engagement between different clinical orientations on the subject quickly reveals that we are speaking in distinct tongues, with diverse considerations and investments in mind. Unchecked confusion is often the result of such “integrative” efforts.
So, it is indeed rare to come upon a work like this. Capable of not only drawing from different traditions to allow for an engaged and well-arranged conversation between often alienated and polarized orientations, Wilson's book is equally able to point out subtle inconsistencies and oversights in the assorted theories that serve as its grounding and fount. A case in point is Wilson's engagement with Lacan. Obviously well-versed in the work of the singular French analyst, he veers away from speaking in Lacanese, so as to speak Lacan in his (Wilson's) own voice, using his own words, all the while providing some worthwhile critiques of Lacan along the way. And here is one of the grand fundaments of the book, an attention to voice (including the actual sound of speaking itself), and its singularity.
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