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



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44 

MURIEL DIMEN, Ph.D.

whether they were classical or, like Dr. O, postclassical: prior to that 

magical cultural shift called the Sixties, the Doctor Knew, the patient did 

not, and most providers and consumers accepted and relished this hier-

archy. After all, it was only in the 1990s that analysts began querying 

what the analyst really knows (Mitchell, 1997; Chodorow, 1996).

It goes without saying that the context for my treatment with Dr. O was 

a hierarchy skewed by sex. Not only as a doctor but as a (heterosexual) 

older man, Dr. O occupied a prestigious social and economic position. 

Not only as a patient but as a (heterosexual) younger woman, I was 

awed. He talked down, in a way once styled as avuncular but now, in the 

light of feminism, can be named for what it was: patriarchal. And, an 

admiring girl glowing in the eroticized light of an older man’s brilliance, 

I ate it up, while keeping my feminist activism mostly out of the room, 

protecting it from his casual contempt, and preserving for myself the 

glory and soothing of his certainty.

Dr. O’s sins of commission and omission were due, then, in part to his 

era and the state of psychoanalysis at which I first encountered it. To his-

tory and gender hierarchy, however, we must add character, and here we 

find a deep and damaging contradiction. Dr. O was a brash and cocksure 

man who would wax fulsomely on uncertainty. True to his psychoana-

lytic philosophy, he would focus on my fear of not knowing: he often 

emphasized that, if only I could accept the inevitability of uncertainty, I 

would be far less anxious. Not a bad idea, either, if he had not been so 

certain about it. Surely my current appreciation of the limits to knowl-

edge has something to do with his influence: when I entered analysis I 

believed anthropology ought to aspire to truth-producing science, but by 

the time I terminated, I was in the throes of proto-postmodernism. Still, it 

is ironic that, given Dr. O’s evident intelligence, as well as his inclination 

to reveal himself, he never took note of the mordant contradiction be-

tween what he said about uncertainty and the certainty with which he 

acted, between his words and his deed.

In this instance, and in general, Dr. O seemed content, even deter-

mined, to do, to act. Sometimes his action was concrete and gestural—

the granted hug—but just as often it was symbolic and linguistic (Harris, 

2005). Indeed, maybe his erection, an action if there ever was one, did 

not spring only from testosterone. Maybe it (and the hormonal flow) 

arose from his use of his tongue, as an organ first of speech and then of 

Eros and power. Remember how his speech act turned the hug into the 

hard-on: he redefined the terms of my embrace by labeling the “real” 

kiss, thereby, through his eroticized authority, invalidating the buss I’d 




SEXUAL VIOLATION  IN AN ANALYTIC TREATMENT 

45

given him and dignifying the kiss he demanded. Transforming my active 



reach for shelter into passive submission to his word, Dr. O found his 

way back to doing, not to mention (patriarchal) power. Was he unsettled 

by my claim on that amoral, impersonal sexuality about which Three Es-

says is so passionate? Was he threatened and excited by my anticipated 

adulterous foray into an earthy and explosive sexual milieu remote from 

his office? Either way, he resorted to what he himself might have deemed 

a security operation—which was also a power move to preserve a patri-

archal masculinity (Corbett, 1993) whose foundations were being shaken 

by a feminist earthquake (Frosh, 1983; Goldner, 2003).

I think that Dr. O generally saw himself as a warm, generous Daddy-

Mom: his expressiveness and volubility went a long way to make up for 

my mother’s depressive coldness. “Healing in the maternal transference/

countertransference” might describe this crucial aspect of my treatment 

with him. However, in my view, the analyst is not another parent; his or 

her job may be to soothe, but not only by doing. Analysts should also 

think with patients about healing so that patients can notice something 

about their own needs. This is not exactly a matter of interpreting or not 

interpreting the positive transference or not. Rather, we would say now 

that it is about reflecting on the repair, on finding the new in the old or, 

even, the new in the new (Boston Change Process Study Group, 2008). 

In helping you to re-represent your experience, the analyst offers the 

means to reclaim and regenerate your own life.

Whether he acted soothingly or sexually, Dr. O usually did so without 

processing. I think he mostly shot from the hip. The high-calorie emo-

tional diet he served was crucial to my psychic malnutrition and I de-

voured it. But it lacked a critical nutrient: shared self-reflection. Clinicians 

are familiar with that stubborn resistance to processing the “unobjection-

able” (Stein, 1981) transference: things are proceeding apace, the patient 

appears to be improving or having insights or progressing in one way or 

another, the analyst is proud. It is harder to hold on to the advice Sullivan 

allegedly gave—“God keep me from a therapy that goes well [ . . . ]!” 

(Levenson 1982, p. 5)—than to savor the feeling, “If it ain’t broke, don’t 

fix it.”


Sotto voce

Psychoanalysis runs on the ordinary silent energies by which people 

stumble their way to each other (Coles, 1998). It puts projections and 

counterprojections to work, turns them into tools, systematizes them, and 

makes them explicit. Assessing this complexity, Levenson (1983, p. 72) 



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