Lucia Tower’s sole publication is a paper titled “Countertransference,” first published in JAPA in 1956. “Countertransference” stands on its own as a psychoanalytic paper of enduring value—direct and unguarded, gutsy and thoughtful—written at the zenith of ego psychology’s hegemony in the United States. In Lacan’s Anxiety (Seminar X, 1962–1963) he discusses the Tower paper at length.

The obscure analyst from Chicago is given a detailed and generous reading by the bedeviling analyst from Paris. As Jacques Lacan emphasizes, Tower shows us that her desire as an analyst is the alive mechanism in the action of analysis; it is the edge or anvil that she loses and then refinds as she works painfully, and as we are wont to say nowadays, authentically, with her patients.

In this afternoon seminar with Mitchell Wilson, we ask participants to read Tower’s paper, Lacan’s reading of it, and Mitchell Wilson’s treatment of these two towering figures. This seminar is also the occasion to celebrate Wilson’s work on the special edition of JAPA (71/5) Lacan In America reassessing the divide between Lacanian psychoanalysis and the American mainstream in the 21st century.

Mitchell Wilson, MD is the Editor-in-Chief Emeritus of the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association. Dr. Wilson has published widely on a variety of topics that cohere around a theory of ethics, desire, and the psychoanalytic process. His recent book, The Analyst’s Desire: The Ethical Foundation of Clinical Practice, is from Bloomsbury Press. He is a Training and Supervising Analyst at the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis, and a Personal and Supervising Analyst at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California. He is in private practice and leads study groups in Berkeley, CA.