Muriel Dimen

Sexual boundary violations are as old as psychoanalysis itself. Yet, even as this professional, intellectual, clinical, and personal dilemma is receiving more attention in the literature, it endures. Do analysts not want to think or talk about it? Is our shared shame, or even ambivalence, in the way? Is the primal crime inherently unstoppable? The author, an analyst herself, addresses this disturbing matter by examining her own experience of a sexual boundary violation from clinical and theoretical perspectives. The essay recounts the author's experience from her dual perspective as both patient and analyst. It offers new ways of thinking about this perennial clinical problem. Using the heuristic of the Oedipal story, Dimen employs psychoanalytic and social theory to detail the effects of gender and sexual hierarchies in treatment. Importantly, Dimen leans into her experience in order to reflect on matters of therapeutic action, therapeutic pacing, cure, and Nachträglichkeit. Locating her analyst’s transgression in its 1970s cultural history, Dimen attempts to decipher what led up to it: what did the analyst do and not do, say and not say? How did the analyst’s character combust with the author’s to produce a conflagration about which the analyst never spoke and the author/​patient remained silent for 30 years? And under what circumstances can the damage inflicted by such an ethical lapse be transformed?

This essay has been published in 2011, in the journal Contemporary Psychoanalysis 47: 36-79. A link to a pdf may be found on the upper right of this page.