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

42 

MURIEL DIMEN, Ph.D.

couragement offered by the feminist world I was helping to build as I 

inhabited it. Still, Dr. O’s authorization of my interior life’s newsworthi-

ness played no small role in the (re)discovery of my literary self. Writing 

had come easily before high school, but until midway through my treat-

ment with Dr. O it was a source of terror and paralysis. Likewise with 

public speaking: facing an audience, I would go mute for a minute as all 

meaning shredded, the muteness recapitulating my regular, more sus-

tained silences in class throughout college and graduate school. Speech, 

writing, and voice returned to me both imperceptibly and in sudden 

leaps even as that flawed treatment proceeded so unevenly.

Dr. O—and, to be sure, psychoanalysis itself—filled a void with mean-

ing: instead of a blank in time, there was tragedy. Without fear of mock-

ery for, as my family usually sniped, “taking yourself too seriously,” I 

could begin to treat myself with delicacy. I know this seems a contradic-

tory experience to have had with a man who confessed to be a bull in a 

china shop. In fact, he once recounted, with glee and delight, that his 

supervising analyst had signed off on his training with the words: “If he 

can’t get in the front door, he’ll use the window.” But second-story men 

are not necessarily unkind. Once, after a tearful session capped by recov-

ery and reconstitution, Dr. O smiled: “I feel like a parent who’s just put 

his kid in her snowsuit and tied her scarf, and is sending her out to play.” 

That he was the subject of the sentence and I, the object, may be one 

reason it sticks in my mind. Still, some tenderness made it past the self-

involvement that consistently wizened his technique.

His identification as a nurturing parent made an indelible impression. 

Its strength goes some way toward explaining why I stayed in treatment 

after his egregious transgression, why I overlooked the selfishness (or 

shall we call it narcissism?) of his desire, why I kept the faith for so long. 

It was not only that I fell for him—became imprinted like a gosling—

when, having rung him for an appointment, I first heard him speak. What 

sacrifice—of speech, knowing, self—would you not make on behalf of a 

man who grasped what you could not, your horrified and helpless vision 

of your mother drowning in her own blood?

Who spoke when your father did not? I knew the immensity of my fa-

ther’s grief: as the funeral home emptied, I spied him, alone facing a 

corner, his body caved in by tears. But I did not go to him. I never men-

tioned his pain and neither did he. After the funeral, someone—I don’t 

know who—handed me my mother’s wedding band, as well as a pearl 

ring given her by my father when he’d risen a bit in the world. Intention-

ally, I refrained from telling him I had the jewelry, because I feared men-

---

SEXUAL VIOLATION  IN AN ANALYTIC TREATMENT 

43

tion of it would hurt. Meanwhile, he was frantically searching for the 

rings, because, of course, he knew they’d been in the hospital safe, and 

he wanted me to have them.

Word and Deed

Will it now seem ungrateful if I notice what Dr. O did not do? Speaking 

where there was silence, Dr. O helped me mourn. Stepping in instead of 

abandoning me to my grief, as we in my family did to each other, he 

named the tragedy and empathized with the anguish it entailed. This 

“corrective emotional experience” (Alexander et al., 1946) was itself 

good. But a little inquiry would have come in handy. Speaking from long 

clinical experience, I wish that, at some point, he had also helped me 

wonder how unthinkable it had been to register my loss as tragic. Psy-

choanalysis is not about just ameliorating the patient’s state. As I have 

learned from my own work and subsequent treatments, it is about help-

ing the patient know what helps, which provides at least some of the 

wherewithal to make a life.

To know what helps in turn depends on recognition, and so it is up to 

the analyst, in recognizing the patient and receiving her recognition in 

turn, to assist her self-recognition (Benjamin, 1988). This process entails 

guiding her through, by participating in (Sullivan, 1953), a reflective pro-

cess that takes place in a relationship, which itself becomes the object of 

that reflectiveness as well (Ogden, 1994). This mutually contemplative 

process by the two knowers in the room (Mitchell, 1997) aims to en-

hance the patient’s self-understanding in a healing way.

To do this, however, analytic technique demands a little humility, a 

virtue not in great supply in Dr. O’s particular consulting room. The cer-

tainty with which he pronounced on the immensity of my mother’s sud-

den death had its downside. For example, during some turbulence in my 

outside life or within the treatment, he would often report, with a saga-

cious air, that he had sailed these perilous passages before. Of course he 

had. But it was his absolute self-confidence that he had already charted 

this territory that would totally reassure me. On reflection, however, it 

would have been better had Dr. O at least noted how hard it was for me 

to bear my fear and doubt, instead of simply telling me not to worry be-

cause he knew what he was doing.

Perhaps, though, the pleasure in being able to supply what I craved, to 

embody omniscience, proved too enticing. In this regard, he resembled 

his peers: Which analysts, trained in the 1960s like Dr. O, did not regard 

themselves as already knowing  the map of psychoanalysis? Forget 

---