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

40 

MURIEL DIMEN, Ph.D.

gle instant—now appears as, so to speak, primus inter pares. Dr. O’s 

lapsus linguae was one among many more mundane clinical missteps in 

my work with a man whose character put a particular spin on a particular 

sort of treatment, for good and for ill. At the same time, it remains not 

only a symbol of profound betrayal, but the thing itself: signifier, signi-

fied, and referent in one. If, in my memory, the hug, the French kiss, and 

the hard-on came to stand for the analysis’ corruption, the event also 

stood out because it entailed a sexual act whose repair would have re-

quired sexual speech from a self whose pre-Oedipal shell had, at the 

time, barely cracked.

Looking back, I think that it actually was my silence that I wanted psy-

choanalysis to cure. And in this treatment I did in fact encounter the new, 

speaking experience I sought, as well as the same old stuff I didn’t know 

I needed to get rid of. In ways both generative and destructive, Dr. O’s 

countertransference matched my transference all too well. When I was in 

treatment with him, there emerged a voice that felt more true to my self 

than any I’d so far heard come out of my mouth or onto paper. At the 

same time, however, as I began to speak, Dr. O advanced his desire, and 

then neglected to speak of it, and so a small but vital piece of me just shut 

right up, went dumb, continued on its silent way. In no treatment is ev-

erything aired. But his silence, enhanced by my muteness, fit a pattern in 

which mutual reflection—on who I was, who he was, what was (not) go-

ing on in our relationship, how we might mutually map it—had no place.

Dr. O’s Help: Mourning My Mother

Oddly enough (or perhaps not oddly at all), only with Dr. O did I begin 

to comprehend how damaging silence can be. One of the underlying 

troubles that drew—or drove—me into treatment was my inchoate re-

sponse to mother’s unexpected death. Except that she had died when I 

was 20, nearly six years before my first visit to Dr. O, and I was silent 

about this loss from January 1963 to December 1968, almost six years. It’s 

not that I never spoke of it at all. But I was emotionally silent. I did not 

know how to grieve, and neither did anyone else in my family. We just 

went about our lives. For me—as, I suspect, for others in this culture—

“process” would become a verb of intimacy only a decade later, in the 

1970s, when therapy became a household word in the United States. My 

family—and friends, and graduate school peers, and husband—did not 

know that talk was helpful; some still don’t find it so.

When, early on, Dr. O asked me how my mother had died, I replied in 

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SEXUAL VIOLATION  IN AN ANALYTIC TREATMENT 

41

black and white: “She was a statistic.” Nonplussed for what would be 

only two or three times in the years I knew him, he managed to ask me 

what I meant. As though reading an obituary of someone remotely famil-

iar, I explained that she’d died after a major routine surgery—removal of 

her thyroid—but that my father had not ordered an autopsy—had pre-

served the silence—and so the cause of her death was unknown. All my 

family knew, from some random nurse’s notes, is that in the wee hours 

my mother, unable to breathe, rang for help. After a tracheotomy, she 

rang again but—somehow we know this—no one answered. Silence in 

the dark hospital night.

Responding in Technicolor, Dr. O exclaimed: “That’s not a statistic, 

that’s a catastrophe!” I do remember the honor I felt upon hearing Him, 

whom I held in awe already, use such a big word about my little life. The 

certainty with which he spoke—and with which, we will have to ac-

knowledge, I must also already have endowed him—was a blessing. 

Looking back, I see that he had properly mirrored my suffering’s magni-

tude, for which I will always be grateful. I had determined to dry my 

tears with probability because, lacking both the hard facts that would 

have been produced by an autopsy and the embrace of a family comfort-

able with mourning, I could not bear her death’s meaninglessness.

But, in Dr. O’s office, where emotion was knowable and meaningful, 

this abrupt loss was no longer just one of those things, an insignificant 

statistic in the history of a population: it mattered. It would never have 

occurred to our family to place an obituary anywhere, but now, with Dr. 

O’s assured protest supporting me, my mother’s death made it into The 

New York Times of my mind. My cry, my grief, my attachment mattered. 

Having received the recognition I didn’t know I was waiting for, I be-

came able to recognize myself, my needs, and my wants. I even began to 

allow myself to want to know, to investigate my loss, and naïvely phoned 

my mother’s cousin, a physician himself, for enlightenment. That he 

could have had no information to offer after so many years was irrele-

vant: the point is that knowing and wanting to know finally felt safe.

1

The newspaper metaphor is no accident. With Dr. O, I began to (re)

find my own voice. I was already claiming possession of it with the en-

1

 I have tried, first during my treatment with Dr. O and then years later, to get the hospital 

records. But St. Joseph’s Hospital of Far Rockaway, having been closed down twice by the 

New York State Department of Health, went out of business for good sometime in the 

1970s, its records buried in the caverns beneath Great Neck’s North Shore Hospital—imag-

ine the final, ironic scene of “Raiders of the Lost Ark.”

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