The Analyst’s Desire: The Ethical Foundation of Clinical Practice

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PROGRAM DESCRIPTION

This conference will focus on a foundational ethics that grounds our work as psychoanalytic psychotherapists. This grounding relates directly to desire, particularly the analyst’s desire, focusing on the deep connections between desire, action, and responsibility. Desire underwrites action. In the case of the psychoanalyst, our desire for certain outcomes, as opposed to others, is ever-present, though often obscured and rationalized by theory in various forms. What do we impose on the patient and the process? We will explore the ethical implications of unexamined desires on the part of the therapist. Numerous problems in the psychoanalytic clinic arise if these questions are not thoughtfully addressed, even though answering them can be challenging for the analyst. Desire and responsibility shape one another; each calls for the other. This program will explore these themes by examining theory, psychoanalytic history and politics, as well as the specifics of our clinical work.

The morning presentation will lay the groundwork for these ideas through a detailed description of the ethical value of the analytic setting, where an inevitably complex relationship develops in dialogue. An ethics of care and desire begins here. In this talk, we will closely examine the works of Julia Kristeva and Viviane Chetrit-Vatine. The afternoon presentation investigates the close connection between the analyst’s desire and countertransference. Here, the question of ethics and analytic action becomes vivid through clinical examples and dilemmas in clinical theory.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Mitchell Wilson is the Editor-in-Chief Emeritus of the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association. In 2020, his book, The Analyst’s Desire: The Ethical Foundation of Clinical Practice, was published by Bloomsbury Press. Lately, he has written on Lacan and Lucia Tower’s paper “On Countertransference” as part of the JAPA special issue “Lacan in America,” “Property, Materiality, Proximity: The Analytic Frame and Person Work,” published in JAPA earlier this year, and also in JAPA, “The Edges of the Voice,” a plenary he gave in New York a year ago. His essay, “Comedy as Resistance,” is forthcoming in Parapraxis. He is a Training and Supervising Analyst at the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis, and a Supervising Analyst at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California. He is in private practice and leads study groups in Berkeley, CA.

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

Participants in this workshop will be able to:

1. Identify the ethical dimensions of the analytic setting and the analyst's role of facilitating a
2. complex relationship of care and dialogue.
3. Describe the elements of “matricial space” and an ethics of care for the other.
4. Describe the differences between the wider and narrower views of countertransference and the ethical implications for practice that they include.
5. Explain how the countertransference experience is conditioned on the desiring state of the analyst
6. Identify specific ethical dilemmas that can result from a lack of awareness of one’s own desires in understanding countertransference experience.
7. Explain how the analyst’s desire and the countertransference experience that unfolds from it are embedded in an ethical field in which responsibility, judgment, and truth are in play.
8. Explain why an ethics of responsibility is crucial to the unfolding of a robust and generative analytic process.
9. Evaluate clinical examples that illustrate ethical challenges and clinical dilemmas relevant to the themes of desire and responsibility.

REFERENCES

• Chetrit-Vatine, V. (2014). The Ethical Seduction of the Analytic Situation: The Feminine-Maternal Origins of Responsibility for the Other. London: Karnac.
• Kite, J. (2016). The fundamental ethical ambiguity of the analyst-as-person. The Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 64: 1153-1171.
• Kristeva, J. (2014). Reliance, or maternal eroticism. The Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 62: 69-86.
• Lacan, J. ([1959-60] 1992). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959-60, ed. J-A Miller, trans. D. Porter. New York: Norton.
• Morris, H. (2016). The analyst’s offer. The Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 64: 1173-1187.
• Mulligan, D. (2017). The storied analyst: Desire and persuasion in the clinical vignette, Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 86: 811-33.
• Oldoini, M.G. (2019). Abusive relations and traumatic development: Marginal notes on a clinical case, Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 88 (2): 251-275.
• Wilson, M. (2016). The Desire for Therapeutic Gain: Commentary on Chused’s “An Analyst’s Uncertainty and Fear”, Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 85: 857-65
• Wilson, M. (2018). The analytic as listening-accompanist: Desire in Bion and Lacan, Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 87: 237-264
• Wilson, M. (2020). The Analyst’s Desire: The Ethical Foundation of Clinical Practice. London: Bloomsbury Academic Press.

CONFERENCE SCHEDULE

8:15 am: ​Registration

9:00 am​: ​Welcome – VAPS President, Jake Rusczek, PhD

9:05 am: ​Introduction of Speaker – Stella Marrie, Psy.D.

​9:15 am: ​Morning Presentation – “If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler: The Psychoanalyst as Inn-Keeper”

10:30 am: ​Break

10:45 am: ​Morning Presentation continued

12:00 pm: ​Lunch

1:30 pm: Afternoon ​​Presentation – “Desire and Responsibility: The Ethics of Countertransference Experience”

2:45 pm: Break

3:00 pm: ​Small Group Discussions

4:00 pm: ​​Large Group Discussion

4:45​ pm: Wrap up / Adjourn

CONTINUING EDUCATION

6 CEs (in ethics) are available for participants who attend this program in its entirety. VAPS is a local chapter of SPPP (Division 39). SPPP is approved by the American Psychological Association to sponsor continuing education for psychologists. SPPP maintains responsibility for the program and its content. APA sponsored continuing education credits are typically accepted by the licensure boards for Psychoanalysts, Social Workers, and Licensed Mental Health Counselors. Upon completion of the program evaluation by participants, a certificate of completion will be issued. This serves as a document of attendance for all participants. Psychologists will have their participation reported to Division 39: SPPP.

VAPS and Division 39: SPPP are committed to accessibility and nondiscrimination in CE activities and will conduct all activities in conformity with the APA’s Ethical Principles for Psychologists. If participants have special needs, reasonable efforts will be made to accommodate them. Participants are asked to be aware of the need for privacy and confidentiality throughout the program. If program content becomes stressful, participants are encouraged to process these feelings during discussion periods. There is no commercial support for either program nor any relationship between the CE sponsor, presenting organization, and presenter that could reasonably be considered a conflict of interest. Participants will be informed of the utility/validity of the content/approach discussed (including the basis for the statements about validity/utility), as well as the limitations of the approach and most common (and severe) risks, if any, associated with the program’s content.