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



Yüklə 306,67 Kb.
Pdf görüntüsü
səhifə14/20
tarix26.09.2017
ölçüsü306,67 Kb.
#2036
1   ...   10   11   12   13   14   15   16   17   ...   20

62 

MURIEL DIMEN, Ph.D.

ability symbolizes the limit they long for, the incest prohibition observed 

in heart and/or body. They aim to redo a vital if bungled childhood pro-

cess, not to self-destroy.

They seek their own desire. They want not to be able to have their 

parent(s), despite a mutual longing (Samuels, 1985, p. 168), so as to be 

left with nothing but  their own private desire in all its differentiating, 

lonely pain and hope. Unfortunately, if, as an adult, you try this “do-

over” with lovers whose self-restraint in service of your growth neither 

can nor ought to be expected, you may waste a lot of time. You are bet-

ter off in therapy. Even so, the repair is hard—Freud (1937) sometimes 

thought it impossible—and to have it reinflicted by that selfsame profes-

sional is a terrible betrayal of psychoanalysis’s promise. Apropos my 

marital problems, Dr. O once quoted Othello, who says of himself (after 

he has been apprehended for killing his wife): “one that lov’d not wisely 

but too well.” Why didn’t he apply that to us?

Splitting the Difference

If, when I was in treatment with Dr. O, he was big and I was little, now 

our positions are reversed: in the analyst’s chair (literally and figura-

tively), I can observe and assess him from a position of authority. That 

my work with him made this reversal possible is ironic. Curiously, it was 

in the very (academic) year of the initial transgression that I began to 

consider becoming an analyst. It has taken me a long time, and the writ-

ing of this article, to understand what will have been immediately obvi-

ous to the reader: Becoming an analyst was one gigantic save. I had 

placed all my faith and trust in this man. In our first five years, I mourned 

my mother with him. During the fourth, I endured a year-long walking 

breakdown, in the latter part of which my father died. So when, 18 

months after that death, Dr. O’s lapse revealed his untrustworthiness, I 

had nowhere to go. My real father gone, I had only his disappointing 

stand-in. I could not bear the pain, which I could begin to register only 

after I ended my 30-year silence. In retrospect, I see that I was stuck: I 

lacked the internal structure to engage full-on the heartbreak, anger, and 

disillusionment that would have rushed in had I relinquished whatever 

guilty pleasure keeping that incestuous secret had bestowed.

So I leapt. I split the difference—choosing to change jobs, I left Dr. O 

without leaving him. Call it my own private Oedipal resolution. Finessing 

the gendered snares faced by a girl working her way out of the Oedipal 

funhouse, I chose to take him at his word and reach for the phallus my-



SEXUAL VIOLATION  IN AN ANALYTIC TREATMENT 

63

self. I was going to do what he did. But I was also going to do what did. 



I was going to be an analyst, like him, and I was also going to continue 

what I was already doing, which is writing and speaking about what mat-

tered to me. Indeed, even though I did not publish my first clinical article 

until about 15 years after I’d begun training (Dimen, 1991), my literary 

life gathered steam as new ideas, topics, and genres found their way to 

me.


This radical shift had a rational context: by this time, I was becoming 

disenchanted with my first profession. Although my awe for anthropol-

ogy endures, by 1973 my zeal to share its wonders with students was 

waning. At the same time, psychoanalysis was working its transforma-

tional magic. Early in college, it had flashed on me, while reading 

Durkheim (1930), that life’s jumble could be decrypted. Just so, as a pa-

tient, I quickly saw, with poignant clarity, that the mind’s mishmash held 

meaning too. Add to that an excitingly systematic way to think about 

women and desire—despite the feminist anti-Freudianism of the time, it 

was plain to me that psychoanalysis was just what the doctor ordered 

(Dimen, 2003)—and I was hooked.

Did my embrace of psychoanalysis permit me to identify with, differ-

entiate from, and (even) exceed Dr. O? Yes, but that’s not the whole 

story. As my analysis heated up, Dr. O’s support was helping me become 

more intellectually confident and active. Inspired by his favorite image, 

Prometheus’s theft of fire, and willing to incur its risks (striving for the 

phallus always fails), I deployed my gains not only in the academy. Even 

as I lay on the couch, I had climbed onto the barricades; weirdly enough, 

I entered psychoanalysis in the same year as I joined my first conscious-

ness-raising group. Throughout my treatment, women’s liberation, as I 

have hinted, served as a parallel home. So as, in Dr. O’s office, I was both 

kindling and damping my own speech, my voice was already shifting 

into new registers in the study groups, protest politics, and (academic) 

thinking that have marked second-wave feminism. Sisterhood’s righteous 

and unstinting, if also sometimes rivalrous (Buhle, 1998), encouragement 

empowered me to speak out even as Dr. O’s office rang with the sounds 

of silence.

For me, psychoanalysis and feminism were not either/or. I needed 

both. It would be banal to say that feminism was the protective mother 

intervening in paternal incestuousness. Movements such as psychoanaly-

sis and feminism do not work like that. Furthermore, each of these, even 

if historical antagonists, carried similar hopes for the self and for change 




Yüklə 306,67 Kb.

Dostları ilə paylaş:
1   ...   10   11   12   13   14   15   16   17   ...   20




Verilənlər bazası müəlliflik hüququ ilə müdafiə olunur ©genderi.org 2024
rəhbərliyinə müraciət

    Ana səhifə