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

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MURIEL DIMEN, Ph.D.

therefore we feel a shared, often mute helplessness that renders us anx-

ious and ashamed. Anxiety and shame may be occupational hazards. 

Arising for many reasons, they evaporate fairly quickly in the case of  

run-of-the-mill mistakes—bungling an interpretation—or even “delin-

quencies” (Slochower, 2003)—e.g., making a note about something per-

sonal—and, of course, neglecting to inquire about the impact of any of 

these errors. Many a time, Dr. O slipped up in this way. So have I. So 

have you. Ken Corbett (2009, p. 187) put it,

Luckily analyses rarely, if ever, turn on such micro-moments; rather they 

are held and built in a different experience of time—a web of contingent 

associations and an ever expansive relay of construction/reconstruction 

that moves unhindered through past, present, and future; such that [for 

example] an intervention can drop a stitch and pick it back up in the next 

thought/association.

Some infractions, however, are less micro than others. Insoluble, unme-

tabolizable, they block vision and thought, and create a shared dilemma. 

In their shadow grows not only shame but stigma or, as Erving Goffman 

(1986) defined it, “spoiled identity.” Such violations, sullying the whole, 

taint each of us. To the extent that professional identity is also personal 

(as it tends to be in the professional-managerial class [Ehrenreich, 1989]), 

the offender’s shame rubs off on everyone else, including the victim.

Nowhere is this truer than at the spot where psychoanalysis planted its 

flag; not even tax evasion bears such a stigma. It was psychoanalysis that 

named sexuality the site where pleasure and danger combust, each serv-

ing as the other’s fuel. Yet this is the place where psychoanalysis keeps 

shaming itself, or being shamed. Plainly, the sexual anxiety that plagues 

civilians bedevils analysts too. Psychoanalysts have extraordinarily im-

portant ideas about sex. But we also have our unique sexual madness, 

nor do we escape the maddening sexual hierarchies and disciplinary 

practices that, both culturally instituted and personally meaningful, in-

form our desire.

Mix all that with indigestible regrets about the inevitable flaws in the 

very means by which we learn our trade and you get, on occasion, some-

thing toxic. Analysis does not fix everything, not even for analysts, and a 

fall from grace that can produce stubborn idealizations. Indeed, as Masud 

Khan (1974)—no slouch in matters of abuse, sexual and otherwise—

opined, this shortfall may propel some into the profession: “those [ . . . ] 

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SEXUAL VIOLATION  IN AN ANALYTIC TREATMENT 

69

content to live with their problems seek treatment” (p. 117), whereas 

those who seek training are those who, in their delusion, hope for cure. 

That he was wrong—civilians want cure too—is not the point.

Analysts live with the discomfort of incomplete Oedipal resolutions, 

lingering incestuousness, and unrenounced attachment needs. Transfer-

ence, home to extraordinary transformation and unspeakable pain, is 

never completely resolved. Angry and disappointed by our own, our 

analysts,’ and, yes, psychoanalysis’ limitations, and somehow shamed by 

all this imperfection, we are stigmatized by the analyst who commits a 

crime and then by the patient who blows the whistle. Our ambivalence 

riding high, we want to be rid of the disturbance they create, as do the 

exploited patient and exploiting analyst themselves.

A Psychoanalytic Transvestite

My tale unsettles a discourse that nests the analytic relationship, what 

cultural historian Raymond Williams (1961) calls a “structure of feeling.” 

Consider what happened when, in response to another conference invi-

tation, I proposed a paper assessing collegial responses to the first itera-

tion of this article (Dimen, 2005a). At first, the committee moved to 

disinvite me: they deemed me unethical towards Dr. O, who, bound by 

confidentiality, could not defend himself against my charges (for a similar 

predicament, see Cornell, 2009). I protested and, upon assuring them 

that Dr. O was deceased and would go unnamed, they reinstated their 

invitation and I gave the lecture (Dimen, 2006).

My injury and anger having yielded to curiosity, I found myself won-

dering what panic would impel analysts to concoct the nutty idea that 

patients are subject to an ethical code. I imagined, to put the best face on 

their rescission, that the committee must have felt torn between compet-

ing loyalties. Impelled to protect both damaged patient and impugned 

colleague, alarmed as (even) psychoanalysts tend to be by sexual impro-

priety, they didn’t know which way to turn. So they compromised by 

inverting the usual binary. Not the analyst but the patient was in power; 

not the patient but the analyst needed protection. The analyst was no 

longer shamed by his sexual infraction; rather the patient was shamed by 

her ethical breach.

Perhaps my having presented myself as both analyst and patient had 

created a “category crisis,” a moment when the familiar arrangement of 

things was put up for grabs. Literary theorist Marjorie Garber (1991) 

coined this term to account for the presence and function of transvestites 

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MURIEL DIMEN, Ph.D.

“in texts as various as Peter Pan, As You Like It, and Yentl, in figures as 

enigmatic and compelling as d’Eon and Elvis Presley, George Sand and 

Boy George.” A category crisis has, she argues, a “resultant ‘transvestite 

effect’” that, in confounding the usual discrete categories of male and 

female, focuses “cultural anxiety, and challenge[s] vested interests” (p. 

17). As both analyst and patient, I became a sort of analytic transvestite, 

panicking the authorities who moved to regulate my speech (Foucault, 

1976).

Not everyone with a story like mine could have had a hearing. Nowa-

days a patient would no longer be dismissed out of hand, as she most 

certainly would have been in Dr. O’s era, but her legitimacy probably 

would not be as solid as that of a professional analyst. In contrast, my 

professional privilege to speak as an analyst gives me a leg up so that I 

can be heard; that I have written substantially about sexuality makes 

such a hearing even more likely. Yet the very reason we are willing to 

attend to a respected colleague who unveils an experience of sexual mal-

feasance puts us at risk: authorized as a knower (Foucault, 1976), she is 

privy to the family secrets that everyone agrees not to talk about.

Written from both perspectives, then, my account puts the profound 

and reassuring binary into question, which the alarmed committee tried 

to recoup by maintaining the dichotomy between analyst and patient, 

but switching their attributes. This mad swap hints at a panic of the sort 

that ensues when, as anthropologist Mary Douglas (1966) proposes in 

Purity and Danger, culturally constructed polarities are breached. Cul-

tural symbolism, she explains, often lines things up in pairs. Whatever 

falls outside such conventional dualities creates disorder, thereby becom-

ing dirty and dangerous. My psychoanalytic transvestite story is just one 

of those disorderly things. There exists in psychoanalysis a deep struc-

ture that aligns analyst and patient in two separate columns: knower/

known, wise/ignorant, powerful/needy, and so on. My tale mixes cate-

gories. Like other marginal creatures and things, “unborn children and 

pubertal initiands in some tribal cultures, or ex-prisoners and mental pa-

tients in our own,” as Garber’s (1991, p. 7) explication of Douglas puts it, 

I and my story enter or generate a state of “‘contagion’ and ‘pollution,’” 

both endangered and endangering.

Not only does my effort to hold myself in mind as both seasoned ana-

lyst and naïve patient merge opposites. It also challenges the implicit hier-

archy behind the seemingly coeval pairs: analyst the greater being on top, 

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