Muriel Dimen

Selected Works

essay
Lapsus linguae, or A Slip of the Tongue? A Sexual Violation in an Analytic Treatment and Its Personal and Theoretical Aftermath
an analyst reflects on her own experience of a sexual boundary violation
anthology
With Culture in Mind: Psychoanalytic Stories
a new kind of clinical writing that integrates a social perspective into psychoanalytic clinical work
Non-Fiction
Sexuality, Intimacy, Power
A scintillating attempt to revivify Freud’s interest in “sexual impulses in the ordinary sense of the term”
The Anthropological Imagination
A popular “anti-text” that introduces cultural anthropology
Experimental Non-Fiction
Surviving Sexual Contradictions: A Startling and Different Look at a Day in the Life of a Professional Woman
Weaves together a fictional first-person narrative with a commentary on sex and politics

The Anthropological Imagination

The fundamental perspectives of an academic discipline too often go unmentioned in textbooks. Texts aim to present orderly answers to every question and final solutions to every problem. But fundamental perspectives contain unsolved problems and unanswered questions. Such perspectives are difficult to articulate because the elemental ideas they contain are both extremely simple and extremely complicated. Basic perspectives and ideas are also the most controversial and therefore the most exciting ones. Because of this, they are precisely what should be available to the nonprofessional. In anthropology, they are views of and ideas about cardinal concerns of our own culture--the nature of human nature; the difference between theory and fact, or knowledge and beliefs; the connections between love and marriage, or scarcity and surplus, or power, honor, and glory; the relationship between individual will and the laws of the cultural and natural universes.

I have, therefore, written this book for the person who, in or out of a classroom, has perhaps heard of anthropology, does not really know what it is, and would like to find out. I have written the kind of book I myself would like to read to learn about an unfamiliar discipline.

I write about fundamental perspectives because they are the framework for theory, and, as I say repeatedly, only through theory can people see, grasp, make, and remake their worlds.