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When it comes to psychoanalysis, it sometimes feels as if everything there is to say has already been written. Many of us need to write to gain a distance from which to appraise our work, but few of us are actually pushing into something new. Not so with Mitchell Wilson’s book, The Analyst’s Desire. This book makes the claim that the analyst’s desire—long disavowed—is an essential ingredient in the analytic process: “the psychoanalyst inhabits her role as analyst with a specific desire that is all the more hidden from view when it is satisfied” (p. xi). This desire serves as the ethical rudder, requiring that the analyst acknowledge and tend to her desire as it guides the entire process. This relationship between the analyst and her desire sheds new light on resistance, transference-countertransference, clinical impasses, and termination. For this reader, the book’s strength is its capacity to reposition the contemporary focus on the analyst’s personhood within a comprehensive, Freudian perspective, tilting our fascination with our own impact on the work in the direction of ethical responsibility.
Wilson’s thesis is based upon a particular reading of the nature of desire, informed by Freud, in the spirit of Lacan. For Wilson, desire has no bottom line. Rather, desire is embodied by “the persistence of human wishing and wanting that not only colors our conscious experience, but also quietly (at times loudly) animates our engagement with the world and the people in it, and bends that world ineluctably in our direction (if not under our direction)” (p. xiv, italics in original). Operating outside of consciousness, desire is the motivating force that underlies all human action, whether aggressive
or loving. The analyst’s analytic desire, then, is not driven toward a measurable outcome, like removing suffering or convincing a patient of a better way of living. Rather, the analyst’s desire animates us, stimulating our emotional engagement, and enlivening our contact wit