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

58 

MURIEL DIMEN, Ph.D.

subjective context, in which adults can reap the bittersweet power and 

pleasure of helping children toward their own sexuality, resonates in the 

analytic dyad, where it requires reflection as well as (in)action.

The Analyst’s Refusal and the Patient’s Desire

As goes Oedipal resolution, so goes the adult incest taboo: neither is ever 

fully accepted or resolved. The relation is likely causal: to the degree that 

adults’ own Oedipal closure is always only partial (Meltzer, 1973) and 

precarious (Freud, 1924), their observation of the prohibition becomes as 

difficult as it is necessary. Lingering Oedipal regrets, stirred in adult fan-

tasies of revitalized fulfillment, haunt analysts too (Gabbard, 2008; Twem-

low & Gabbard, 1989), even Dr. O. However intersubjectively carried 

such ecstatic fantasies of repair, still their disposition belongs finally to 

the person in charge—parent, analyst—who must register their presence 

but forego their realization. Achieving this surrender—tolerating the per-

manence of sexual melancholy—is no small task (Davies, 1998, 2003). It 

requires support from various sources, what Benjamin (2006) calls the 

moral third but also all that is denoted by le nom du père in its protective 

as well as disciplinary sense—community, culture, morality, the Law. 

This accomplishment is crucial: the negotiation of desire that constitutes 

one’s life flourishes when tended by another’s restraint.

4

Dr. O’s refusal to examine Oedipal dynamics inhabited an intellectual 

and clinical void. He did not employ the classical one-person model; and 

a two-person model of sexual desire, in which adult desire may serve as 

a technical consideration is, as I have noted, still in the making. At the 

same time, other factors were at work. Framing that void were not only 

flaws in his training and gaps in psychoanalytic knowledge, and the en-

during power dynamics of authority and of gender, but, I am sorry to say, 

basic character faults too. Woulda, coulda, shoulda. Yet I cannot help but 

wonder what might have happened had psychoanalysis offered a theory 

of adult incestuousness as a partner to its theory of Oedipal longing. 

Might all the Dr. Os out there, including my own, have been able to keep 

their desire to themselves and leave room for their patients?

What I wanted was a paradoxical—and reparative—relation in which 

“me-first” happily puts itself second. What I got instead was a “me-first” 

on parade, its glow magnified in and by my delight. To be sure, he did 

4

 At least within the culture I know, for I am too much of an anthropologist to make this a 

universal claim.

---

SEXUAL VIOLATION  IN AN ANALYTIC TREATMENT 

59

opine on my identificatory wish to be the center of my universe. Still, the 

sort of reflection I required was rather more mutual than Oedipal, a sort 

of dyadic version of the triad, what we can now call the pre-Oedipal ho-

moerotic transference/countertransference (Benjamin, 1988). I needed to 

hear more about us, less about him. I have no idea whether, beyond (I 

suspect) reductively deeming his passion for me “natural,” he mulled 

what he did and felt. He should have. But then, given that he had mate-

rialized his phallic desire, I needed him to show his analytic desire too, 

to make some version of his private musings public between us, so that 

together we could process what was going on for me, what his actions 

and feelings had to do with mine.

As is well-known, if perhaps infrequently articulated, analysts’ ability 

to contain their own desire with self-awareness equates to parents’ ob-

servance of the incest prohibition. Such self-conscious containment cre-

ates and protects a gap in which the patient’s subjectivity can come into 

its own (Bernstein, 2006). Bound to the mast of professionalism and care, 

analysts, like Odysseus (Wilner, 1998), ought to hear but not dance to the 

music of patients’ desire. Their holding back depends on their cultivated 

capacity to recognize and contemplate their own desire (hence the re-

quired training analysis).

Recursively, in fact, the two abilities, to reflect on desire and to contain 

it, enhance each other. One may read Odysseus’s mast as phallic (le nom 

du père) (Schein, 2009). Or, with Benjamin (1998), one may theorize the 

labor of holding and reflecting as a (traditionally) maternal practice: re-

vising the active/passive binary, she argues that passivity is not just activ-

ity’s opposite, but also signifies containment. Others (e.g., Davies, 1998; 

Cooper, 2003) style this work as an analytic capacity, technique, and ob-

ligation. They argue that, by detecting and analyzing adult sexuality, ana-

lysts can decode and manage sexual countertransference.

Conceived thus, the taboo on adult incest causes a rupture—the parent 

says “no”—that allows one to know one’s own desire. By making room 

for child or, mutatis mutandis, the patient, the two-person materializa-

tion of the incest prohibition cultures a one-person experience. The ban, 

observed, opens a space (in Lacan, a lack [Mitchell & Rose, 1982]) that is 

at once full and empty (which might be as good a description as any to 

capture the feeling of desire). This opening is replete with potential: the 

option of sex between parent and child or analyst and patient, ruled out, 

transmutes into the child’s/patient’s potency and fantasy (see Samuels, 

1996, p. 310). The parent/doctor who slips desire’s leash leaves the child/

---