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

38 

MURIEL DIMEN, Ph.D.

concrete Greek parapraxis (an act or deed gone wrong; Freud’s Fehlleis-

tung  (faulty action [Strachey, 1901]) to that which lapsus linguae 

connotes.

The Latin, in contrast, simmers with imagery; according to the Oxford 

Latin Dictionary (Glare, 1982, p. 1002), “lapsus can have several senses 

[in historical order]: (1) simply falling down or slipping; (2) a smooth 

gliding motion, e.g., slithering, creeping; (3) a fall from favor or high 

rank; (4) the fact of falling into error or misconduct, failing, lapse” 

(Schein, 2010). This layer-cake of meanings seems apt: the slithering 

tongue, the fall from grace, the creepy misconduct. Happily, lingua puns 

too, signifying “tongue” as organ and speech (Glare, 1982, p. 1032–1033), 

a doubling whose special relevance to this familiar, albeit unique, situa-

tion will become clearer later on.

In this article, I want to restore depth and time to an instance of a phe-

nomenon that happens frequently when the person in need is young and 

female (but also sometimes male), and is seeking help from an older 

male (but also sometimes female) authority. This ongoing violation of 

trust is barely thinkable in the vocations marked and marred by it—from 

the religious and spiritual to the medical and secular, including, I must 

emphasize, all brands of psychoanalysis. So I want to try to think about 

that fragmented experience, to repair and fill it in by drawing on my own 

history, as well as on profession-wide ideas and practices that have 

evolved exponentially since my treatment with Dr. O (who, it should be 

said, is no longer alive). I hope this project will also contribute some-

thing to the discourse on boundary violations.

To do this, I must disclose, selectively, a bit of myself. Autobiography 

is, of course, subject to various dangers: one is not one’s own best histo-

rian, and memory is not a value-free scientific method (not to mention 

the problem with self-analysis, which is, as they say, countertransfer-

ence). But autobiography is all I’ve got. Here was the classic trauma, 

which I kept from myself: the only one I felt could help me was the one 

who had harmed me, whom I needed, and in whose trustworthiness I 

therefore urgently had to believe. For Gabbard and Pope (1989, p. 118), 

sexual boundary violations by analysts may sow doubt, inclining patients 

to “postpone [ . . . ] grief work and hold on to the fantasy that someday 

[ . . . ] [incestuous] wishes will be gratified.” Indeed, one prod for staying 

in treatment as long as I did may have been a dissociated hope for a re-

peat performance: a few years past the treatment’s second and final end 

(not recounted here), I was startled to discover a fantasy that Dr. O was 

---

SEXUAL VIOLATION  IN AN ANALYTIC TREATMENT 

39

to have been waiting for me at the end of termination road. My struggle 

in writing this account has been to balance my loss, grief, and fear of 

shame with the capacity to think (Bion, 1962; Fonagy, 2002). Indeed, 

perhaps I became an analyst—a process I will later assess—to help me 

think about something that did not bear thinking, to speak the unspeak-

able, and to grieve while speaking.

In what follows, I consider the roots of Dr. O’s lapse in this strange 

treatment, which can be deemed both a success and a failure. His trans-

gression issued from the mix of what he, as I perceived him, and I, as I 

perceive myself, brought to it; conceptual lacunae and technique poorly 

used; and dangers inherent to psychoanalysis. In Part I, I trace how my 

muteness wed Dr. O’s silence, fashioning an analysis laced with an inces-

tuous streak, a matter I take up theoretically as well as clinically in Part II. 

In the Conclusion, I reflect on psychoanalysis’ collective dilemma: the 

primal crime of sexual transgression.

Throughout, I will be bearing in mind the professional, intellectual, 

and cultural contexts in which the analysis took place and in which my 

reflections have emerged. In that sense, this article may be read as an ac-

count of an era in which the deep structure of psychoanalysis began to 

change. My treatment with Dr. O bridged the late 1960s and the early 

1980s, an epoch that generated patients’ rights, democracy in the consult-

ing room, the acknowledgement of parental sexual abuse of children, 

and of course, what preceded them all, women’s liberation.

I. The Sounds of Silence

Reinvented by Nachträglichkeit,  memories are uncertain possessions. 

When I first began this article, I believed the most shocking piece of Dr. 

O’s betrayal to be his sexual transgression. In reaction, I had shattered: 

one part of me flourished in its attachment to psychoanalysis, the other 

lived in terrible, mute remembrance. Writing this article has set these two 

parts of me in conversation with each other and with the psychoanalytic 

world. This colloquy has in turn revised my estimate of Dr. O’s most 

stunning perfidy: in the context of the talking cure, his resounding si-

lence, as much as his intrusive act, broke his compact and my heart. Fe-

renczi (1933), of course, taught us this a long time ago, but it’s one thing 

to read and another to live.

Breaking my own silence has recast the past. Crucially, a seemingly 

unique moment—indeed, it had been fabricated by dissociation as a sin-

---