Mitchell Wilson is a psychoanalyst, psychiatrist, writer and editor, teacher and independent scholar. He is currently the Editor in Chief of the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, and is a Training and Supervising Analyst at SFCP and the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California (PINC).
I graduated from UC Berkeley with various honors in 1979 and then attended medical school at UCSF. At that time, I was restless and searching for a deeper engagement with the humanities, so I took a leave of absence from UCSF to study English back at Berkeley where I focused on psychoanalytic theory (mostly Freud and Lacan) and the development of the early novel form (Sterne, Fielding, Richardson). After receiving a Master's degree in English Literature, I returned to UCSF, where I graduated in 1984. After a residency in psychiatry, also at UCSF, I was a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar at Stanford. My RWJ project was in the history of medicine and psychiatry and resulted in the lead article in the American Journal of Psychiatry in 1993, "DSM-III and the Transformation of American Psychiatry: A History." Around that time I began psychoanalytic training at the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute, graduating in 1997.
In psychoanalysis I found a practice and way of thinking in which an intersection of my interests and passions could find a capacious home. For the past 25 or so years I have taught numerous classes at SFPI (now SPCP) on a variety of topics including Freudian theory, Lacan, theories of clinical process and impasse, psychoanalytic writing, ethics and psychoanalysis, and several case conferences. My writings have been published in all the major psychoanalytic journals, and I've been fortunate to have been awarded two important prizes: the JAPA Prize for best paper, "The Analyst's Desire and the Problem of Narcissistic Resistances" in 2003, and the Heinz Hartmann Award from the New York Psychoanalytic Institute for my paper, "'Nothing can be further from the truth': Lack and the Analytic Process," published in 2006. Much of this writing, in new and revised form, can be found in, The Analyst's Desire: The Ethical Foundation of Clinical Practice (Bloomsbury Academic Press, 2020).