Property and Psychoanalysis

Presenter: Mitchell Wilson, MD

In this talk, Dr. Wilson considers the concept and economic fact of property in relation to the training and practice of psychoanalysts. The principle of ownership, and the legal system that has been built up around it ("private property") has broad influences, from the physical places in which we practice to the words we utter in conversation with patients. Through the lens of property, issues of race and class as they relate to psychoanalytic work can be more easily discerned. And property is one way to trace important changes in the history of analytic clinical theory: from an emphasis on things (dreams, fantasies, wishes) to space (transitional, gaps and lacks, the field).