A sexual violation in an analytic treatment and its personal and theoretical aftermath

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MURIEL DIMEN, Ph.D.

stupid had I shouted: “You think she is more beautiful than me and I hate 

that and I hate you for making me feel jealous and ugly by hanging this 

drawing where I know you gaze upon it too!” Jealous of an image? How 

immature is that? I needed help with this triangle but got none.

This silence—mine, Dr. O’s, ours—about what his décor meant to me 

entailed an unanalyzed Oedipal repetition. It prevented reflection on the 

fact that, for me, sexual crudeness, disrespect, and love came in the same 

paternal package. Consider my fascinated horror in the face of my fa-

ther’s sadistic lewdness. For example, his jest at a family Thanksgiving—

“Are we having sliced breast of Marilyn Monroe?”—could register and be 

assessed only in my second analysis. Who knows what primal scene fan-

tasies Dr. O and I might have come upon had we scrutinized my re-

sponse to his aesthetics? Instead, I just felt sick, sensing but unable to 

speak my gloriously self-abnegating desire to slice and dice myself so as 

to win a patriarch.

Typically transforming anxiety and shame into thought, I now recall 

noting that, like me, the artist’s model was lying down. At the time, I 

failed to connect the dots. In contrast to me, for example, she was physi-

cally naked but a psychic cipher. I, on the other hand, was trying to un-

dress for the doctor in hopes he would heal my torment. From my second 

session onward, I believed that, if I told the whole and especially the 

most shameful truths to this man who knew better, I would get better. 

And maybe, I may have gradually come to hope, he would love me more 

than her.

No, when I got up, I flipped the couch instead. I do not think I was 

exactly trying to show that I disliked that couch or its weird positioning. 

Perhaps I was defying his injunction at the beginning of treatment: “You 

can do whatever you want except spit on the floor or break up the 

place.” Except I did, as I noted, clean up after my fit. Perhaps, then, I was 

flipping the bird at the whole set-up. Consider this: even if the viewer 

saw the model as though from the foot of the artist’s divan and me from 

the side of Dr. O’s couch, still Dr. O, from his rather more in-charge posi-

tion, commanded a view of both of us, differently naked, lying on our 

backs, the object of his gaze. At ease in his slightly reclining chair, not 

hidden behind analytic neutrality but, rather, clothed in his power to dis-

close whatever he pleased about himself (or not), even as I was obeying 

the command to reveal all (Foucault, 1976)—he could contemplate not 

only her pulchritude but my young embodied self, which was, I now 

understand, far more attractive than I knew or could handle. (Although 

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SEXUAL VIOLATION  IN AN ANALYTIC TREATMENT 

55

tempted, I will refrain from speculating about his fantasies of two prone, 

bare women in his visual field.)

To put it starkly, the room’s layout made him its subject and the analy-

sand—in this case, me—his object. That he seemed in charge of his de-

sire was made more exciting by his charge of me. Dr. O’s masterful 

vantage on me (and the image) was pleasing, titillating, and deeply dis-

tressing. Once, I seem to recall, he voiced pleasure in my stocking-ed 

legs; it may have been when, six months into treatment, I was consider-

ing the couch. If I can still picture his smile, I recall only nonsense: he 

liked (women) patients to lie down, he said, because “I get to look at 

their legs.” I was, I see now, both delighted and dismayed that he shame-

lessly acknowledged exploiting the couch, not to mention the patient, for 

his own pleasure. I was also jealous of these other patients, as well as 

unsettled by his mentioning them. Decoded in hindsight, his remark un-

consciously introduced, without analyzing, the Oedipal dynamics already 

at play. But at the time, my mind grasping at nothing, I found only the 

shamed suspicion that, as the cliché goes, he said that to all the girls, a 

fairish bet because he was really talking about no one but himself.

In fact, I have a hunch that central to his self-image was being a man 

who made no bones about his enjoyment of women, who, he believed, 

enjoyed his desire. Yes, I can imagine that, working in emotionally cor-

rective mode, he thought his compliments would heal my fractured and 

frightened sexual narcissism: perhaps, at least momentarily, believing in 

the omniscience with which I endowed him, he may have thought that I 

could take his (hetero)sexual appreciation of me as the truth about my-

self. Yet, even within such a sad and harmful delusion, had he inquired 

how I might feel about his admiration, he might at least have helped me 

to my own language, desire, and mind. Given a moment to name my 

shamed pleasure in being only (only!) the object of his desire, I might 

also been able to claim the more tacit wish to sit not on his lap (a desire 

he once attributed to me in a fit of ill-timing) but in his chair, to com-

mand a view not so much of the patient as of myself.

Dr. O should have kept the noise of his desire to himself. I do not fault 

him for having it; I fault him for not making room for mine. Sex may en-

compass both relatedness and enigma, but that it remains a site of selfish-

ness (see Stein, 2005) makes it dangerous—if also by that token exciting. 

It is good to remember Freud’s (1908) original insight about the amorality 

of desire. This ruthlessness may show up in mind as well as actions, in 

incest of the heart as well as of the body. Indeed, for Dr. O and his pro-

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