Dialogues in Contemporary Psychoanalysis

2025 - 2026 Dialogues in Contemporary Psychoanalysis

Program Title: Malignant Nostalgia: the impulse to eradicate “the bitter experience of life.”
Donald Moss, MD in Conversation with Mitchell Wilson, MD
Date: Saturday, December 6, 2025
Time: 09:30am – 12:30pm PT
Presenter: Donald Moss, MD
In Conversation With: Mitchell Wilson, MD
Location: San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis
444 Natoma Street
San Francisco, CA 94103
(remote option is available)
Program Fee: Program fee to be announced

Donald Moss, M.D. has been in psychoanalytic practice for 45 years. He is the author of five books—including the Gradiva Prize-winning Psychoanalysis in a Plague Year—and over sixty articles, most recently “Encountering Representations of Evil” and “Always There and Never Before: The Eclipse of Everyday Life.” Winner of the Haskell Norman Prize for Excellence in Psychoanalysis, and member of the Holmes Commission on Racial Equality in American Psychoanalysis, he teaches Freudian theory at the New York Psychoanalytic Society & Institute.

Mitchell Wilson, M.D. is the Editor-in-Chief Emeritus of the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association. In 2020, his book, The Analyst’s Desire: The Ethical Foundation of Clinical Practice, was published by Bloomsbury Press. Lately, he has written on Lacan and Lucia Tower’s paper “On Countertransference” as part of the special JAPA issue “Lacan in America,” “Property, Materiality, Proximity: The Analytic Frame and Person Work” published in JAPA earlier this year, and also in JAPA, “The Edges of the Voice,” a plenary he gave in New York in 2024. His essay, “Comedy and Cruelty: The Comic Mode in the Age of Trump,” was recently published in Parapraxis 6: Resistance. He is a Training and Supervising Analyst at the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis, and a Supervising Analyst at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California. He is in private practice and leads study groups in Berkeley, CA.

Program Co-Chairs:
Henry Markman, MD & Julie Ruskin, PhD

Adam Blum, PsyD
Elizabeth Bradshaw, PhD
John DiMartini, PhD

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Saturday, December 6, 2025
Dialogues in Contemporary Psychoanalysis
Malignant Nostalgia: the impulse to eradicate "the bitter experience of life.”
Donald Moss, MD (presenter) in Conversation with Mitchell Wilson, MD
Wednesdays, January 7 to 28, 2026
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