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

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MURIEL DIMEN, Ph.D.

patient at once famished and over-full. By contrast, analysts who contem-

plate their passion for their patients can exchange stolen pleasure for the 

sense of a job well done. They can savor a subtle, privileged view of 

dependents becoming what they need and will: autonomous (Cooper, 

2003). Or, to be more realistic, analysts may get to survive the equally 

delicate pain of watching patients make their own errors and discover 

that they no longer want what they once (thought they) did—which may, 

indeed, be one way to capsule the Oedipal resolution.

5

In revising the psychoanalysis of incestuous desire, it is important 

 

to render desire as neither wholly discharge-driven nor solely object-

seeking. What matters is that, insofar as the ban on incest is observed, 

childhood’s bolus of longing and loss, of disappointment, shame, and 

anger, is part of growing up. Parents cannot save their children from it, 

just as analysts cannot save patients. Indeed, they foster it and, with it, an 

interior space for imagination, wish, and fantasy. One of those predict-

able life wounds that Freud warns about, the suffering of unrequited 

love, is also key to a certain freedom: having endured it, one both gains 

oneself and is spared the unbelievable confusion attendant on one’s de-

sires being granted by the very other from whose desires one is trying to 

free oneself. One is granted the room to create oneself as if one were 

autonomous. I am here varying Benjamin’s (1988) paradox of separation. 

If independence requires separation from the (m)other on whom one 

depends, so claiming one’s desire, in all its impossibility and ambiguity, 

rests on having it separately and, in effect, differently from those with 

whom it birthed and still lives—and who understand the pain they 

inflict.

Hence my wish that Dr. O, the man who listened as well as talked, 

5

 Can tantrums signify the ineluctable, fatal twinning of parental failure and unrequited 

love? If so, then, when recurring in transference, they need interpretation. In my case, they 

required countertransference analysis as well. I am guessing that, if Dr. O had mulled his 

desire and its object-relational context, then maybe, rather than flinging things around (al-

beit in slow-motion), I could have identified my tangled sexual, filial, and romantic long-

ings. Instead, my tantrums fed on a mess of unregistered desire, disappointment, shame, 

and anger. In the relational view, such a vortex may be a developmental certainty. Or so my 

reading of Fairbairn’s (1954, p. 113, n. 1) revision of psychosexual theory suggests. As he 

sees it, (sexual) frustration registers as rejection. It is true, he writes, that “frustration” might 

accurately describe the classical Freudian construal of drive denied its outlet. But if, as he 

proposes, libido seeks and enjoys connection, then frustration means that a desired attach-

ment with another has failed. To the extent that such failure registers as lost love, the ob-

ject’s dis/regard will in turn seem repudiating. Taking this further, I would add that rejection 

morphs into humiliation insofar as the child, sparing the beloved and needed object by 

faulting the self (Winnicott 1975; Guntrip 1973), comes to feel like a fool. Finally, shame 

snarls with (more) unwelcome anger and, voilà, a tantrum.

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SEXUAL VIOLATION  IN AN ANALYTIC TREATMENT 

61

would have helped me utter the dilemma of our real relationship: getting 

what I wanted—emotional and corporeal incest—kept me from realizing 

my need, that is, a validation of the legitimacy of my complaints. If you 

can reflect on it, unrequited love permits you to sense your desire as 

distinct  from, other to, the desire of the other who matters to you as 

much as your own life. But you need someone else to help you do it. 

This growth takes place via the experience—or maybe even a fantasy—

of being held by a parent or analyst or teacher or author or, I suppose, 

even an idea. Symbolizing the previously unsymbolized, the abjection 

(Kristeva, 1982) that survived results from such restrained containment, 

and constitutes a painful, profoundly personal corner for self-knowledge 

and self-containment (perhaps Eigen’s [1981] “area of faith”). You need to 

be able to experience your desire, abject and soaring, with your parent 

who is feeling this too and knows it and is intentionally not acting but is 

instead bearing the poignant sight of your passion as it bursts into flame, 

you with whom your parent has identified, whom she or he identifies as 

her or his own, and whom she or he is allowing to live.

When, instead, that noisy “confusion of tongues” (Ferenczi, 1933) 

clogs the space that ought to have been full of nothing but piercing pos-

sibility, longing dries up. A dream I told Dr. O: “There was a man named 

Sussman, I think we knew him in the country. Out of his lower bicep, 

which had somehow been pierced, drained a liquid, a mixture of sugar, 

vinegar, and water.” Dr. O did not opt to interpret “Suss” as referring to 

the contemporaneous idiom for discovery: “to suss something out.” Nor 

did I. Instead he chose the bucolic reading: “Süss-man, sweet man, aren’t 

you talking about your feelings for me?” He ignored the vinegar (semen 

is only sometimes sweet) and, in an unconscious, sublimely self-immo-

lating blow-job, I let him do it by acting as though his omission (emis-

sion?) had not taken place. In this narcissistic evasion of the bittersweet, 

he resembled my father, who, unable to bear criticism or imagine himself 

as hurtful, appeared to ignore love’s ambivalence.

You need, as I say, someone to help you. And although an adult love 

relation may offer this help, it is fairly unlikely. I have often wondered 

about women I treat, as well as those in my acquaintance, who pine for 

lovers they cannot have. My sense, speaking from my own experience 

too, is that those suffering this particular variety of unrequited love— 

especially the heterosexual subjects of Women Who Love Too Much (Nor-

wood, 1985)—want someone they cannot have because they want not 

an object but a boundary. (This may also be true of some men.) Unavail-

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