Recent Writings & Interviews
My Partners in Conversation. JAPA, 2023. Read here.
Anxiety, Desire, and the Object a: Lacan on Lucia Tower’s “Countertransference.” JAPA, 2023. Read here.
​
Edges of the Voice in Psychoanalysis. JAPA, 2024. Read here.
Comedy and Cruelty: The Comic Mode in the Age of Trump. Parapraxis, 2025. Read here.
Showing Up in Life: A Clinical Report. JAPA, 2025. Read here.
​
Dr. Mitchell Willson on materiality, embodiment and proximity in teleanalysis, PINC Technology & The Mind Podcast, March 7, 2023. Listen here.
​
Analytic Desire, Listening and Letting Go with Mitchell Wilson, MD, International Psychoanalytical Association - On and Off the Couch Podcast, November 13, 2022. Listen here.​
New Books in Psychoanalysis, May 13, 2021
The Analyst's Desire
My book, The Analyst's Desire: The Ethical Foundation of Clinical Practice, was published by Bloomsbury Academic Press in 2020. I explore the most personal aspects of psychoanalysis: the unavoidable and fundamental desire that motivates a person to work as an analyst and to engage with a patient who is invested in it. Through the blending of psychoanalytic theory and detailed clinical examples, I discuss how essential aspects of the analytic process, such as countertransference and clinical impasses, cannot be fully understood without considering the analyst's desire for particular experiences with their patients. The analyst wants something they are not getting at that difficult moment. What is it?
​
The Analyst's Desire thoughtfully explores this fundamental question with all its complexity and variety— including revealing insights into my personal history, a sharp engagement with the theories of Lacan, Melanie Klein, the neo-Kleinian tradition, Bion, Winnicott, and investigations into the institutional history of the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis.
Praise for The Analyst's Desire
"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 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. "
–Fort!Da!​
​
"Mitchell Wilson is a writer, which is not so for all psychoanalysts who write. His care for the grace and rhythm of the voice, for the music of the prose, expresses a desire not only to convey his argument but to evoke desire in the reader. The desire to affect the desire of the reader arises implicitly—structurally—whenever one puts pen to paper. Even the most dry and scientific writing presumes a desire to know in the reader. Wilson’s writing is not dry and scientific. It is lively writing. The reader is aroused by the play of language not only by the presentation of ideas, not only by the desire to know but the desire to know the other, the author. The presence of the authorial voice and care for its effects on the other are essential elements of this important and evocative book as is the awareness and responsibility inherent in arousing the desire of the other."
–Psychoanalytic Psychology
​
​