An Ethics Workshop Presented by Mitchell Wilson

Event Price: Fees include CEs. This is a free event for HP/CPC students and candidates, $60 for CPC/HP members and nonmember students, and $90 for nonmembers who are not students.

Continued Education (CEU/CME): 3.0 Credits (Note: This event will qualify for Ethics CEs)

Attendance: Hybrid Event - In Person & Virtual event via Zoom Meeting

Program Description:

An ethics essentially consists in a judgment of our action …

––Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis

This is not your typical program on ethics. It will not address boundary violations and other related topics. I am interested in 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 are we doing and why? What do we wish to experience? What do we aim to make manifest? What do we impose on the patient and the process? 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, most notably the varieties of clinical impasses.

Learning Objectives:

1) Participants will be able to explain the role of the analyst’s wishes and desires in the formation of the countertransference.

2) Participants will be able to describe how the analyst’s desire and responsibility for that desire are intimately linked regarding the analyst’s ethical position in the clinical situation.

Mitchell Wilson is the former Editor-in-Chief of JAPA, and the author of The Analyst’s Desire: The Ethical Foundation of Clinical Practice (Bloomsbury 2020). He has developed a theory of clinical process that centers the analyst’s wishes, intentions, values, and commitments at the heart of their ethical stance. He has recently published papers and essays on tele-therapy, the importance of the voice in clinical work, and the tension between the tragic and comic visions in the psychoanalytic perspective. He is a Training and Consulting Analyst at the SF Center for Psychoanalysis, and at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California.