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Statements such as “The analyst’s desire is not a pure desire. It is a desire to obtain absolute difference, a desire which intervenes when, confronted with the primary signifier, the subject is, for the first time, in a position to subject himself to it” (Lacan [1964a] 1973, 276) have left readers - Lacanians or not - perplexed about how they ought to understand this strange thing called the analyst’s desire. Other mantras such as that “the desire of the analyst is the desire to keep an opposition between demand and desire” ([1966] 2002, 529), or that “it is ultimately the analyst's desire that operates in psychoanalysis” ([1966] 2002, 724), have helped little to further an understanding of this complex concept. Bruce Fink represents an exception since he contributes to clarifying the position of the analyst when he writes that “The analyst in the position of cause of desire for the analysand is, according to Lacan, the motor force of analysis; in other words, it is the position the analyst must occupy in order for transference to lead to something other than identification with the analyst at the endpoint of an analysis (identification with the analyst being considered the goal of analysis by certain psychoanalysts)” (1997, 39) (emphasis is in the original).
However, it is Mitchell Wilson’s recent book The Analyst’s Desire: The Ethical Foundation of Clinical Practice that renders this complicated idea more understandable and brings it into relationship with the British and Relational Schools’ singular focus on countertransference, in particular its chief protagonist, the process of projective identification. Wilson is no longer taking on the politics of the IPA from the 1950s, nor the past goals of the ego psychologists who had forcefully advocated the goal of psychoanalysis to be a positive identification with the analyst. Instead, Wilson gets right into the trenches of the Kleinian, Bionian and Independent School traditions in order to peel away and examine the d