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

48 

MURIEL DIMEN, Ph.D.

tion but nevertheless put up with it—this difference may have had also to 

do with gender as well as character. Certainly the blue-collar chip that he 

wore on his businessman’s shoulder had something to do with his attrac-

tive cockiness, defiance, and tendency to bully.

A quiet girl patient must have been a mixed blessing for Dr. O. He 

never addressed my paralyzed silence as such—and to have done so at 

the times of my most shameful muteness would have been tactless—but 

even then, I could tell from his repeated efforts to work around my 

voicelessness how trying he found it. Clumsily persistent, Dr. O would 

often ask, “What’s in your head?” Perhaps making him toil gratified me, 

but mostly I felt helpless. It may be that all those years with him laid the 

groundwork for my second analyst’s success in helping me to put words 

to my silence. Or it may be that my second analyst eventually addressed 

directly that which held my stubborn muteness in place, the helpless 

shame I wore like a burka, which, hidden in plain sight, Dr. O never 

mentioned, at least not until it was too late.

Pre-Oedipal Delight, Oedipal Shame

Writing this article has gradually heightened my awareness. Now I see 

that, at the same time as the pre-Oedipal, maternal failure was being re-

paired, an uninterpreted Oedipal and (mostly) paternal repetition was 

taking place. If the one signals the success of the treatment, the other 

marks its failure. Even if it is generally recognized now that pre-Oedipal 

and Oedipal matters and themes show up in a mix, separating them 

helps me think. For example, it allows me to put into its proper context 

Dr. O’s denigrating response to my admiration for a professor who’d re-

searched the ritual use of hallucinogens among the Jivaro of the Brazilian 

Amazon: “Aw yeah, he’s an academic, he’d have to do those drugs.” My 

puzzlement upon hearing his castrating words emerges now clearly as a 

life-preserving but also stubborn defense against dismantling the savior-

mother so as not to unveil the destroyer-father.

If my silence obstructed Dr. O, the scope it offered his self-expansion 

must have been a delight. Or so I guess. This was a man full of himself, 

I can now safely say. From the vantage point of an altered psychoanaly-

sis and a changed me, I can avow the appeal of this off-putting quality to 

me, a person whose self seemed like something no one would want, let 

alone be full of. When Dr. O spoke, he seemed to enjoy himself, to 

stretch out into his words and ideas. Looking back, I see myself enjoying 

his (macho display of his) enjoyment. I see myself watching in both im-

printed awe and heterosexual wonder someone so apparently free and 

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SEXUAL VIOLATION  IN AN ANALYTIC TREATMENT 

49

happy in his expressiveness. I see myself craving such delight and pride. 

Now, as a clinician, when I find this yeasty pleasure rising (Smith, 2000), 

I try to take such (hierarchical) self-indulgence as a warning: why is the 

room filling up with my voice, not my patient’s? But as a needy patient, I 

was inspired to imagine myself a free speaker who liked herself while 

speaking.

If my silent rapture was implicated in a heterosexual gender hierarchy, 

it may also have been part of an uninterpreted pre-Oedipal (maternal 

and/or paternal) transference. It was a joy to be spoken to, and with, and 

in front of by him. I was always happy to be with people who spoke flu-

ently, because then I had to be neither lonely nor verbal. But, with Dr. O, 

this safety had wings of ecstasy. When Dr. O mused on ideas and phi-

losophy, he seemed to take me into his confidence. If little of what he 

said has lasted, I do recall my (unstated and unanalyzed) bliss. His flatter-

ing implication of a mutual intellectual footing resumed a trajectory I’d 

lost when my mother died (and never had with my father). He offered a 

life of the mind that she’d pined for and, judging, for example, by our 

memorable museum trips, wanted to share with me. Inferring from my 

own experience of patients who are excited to be with me, my rapt at-

tention encouraged him, and the pleasure he took in me was likely fu-

eled by my intensity.

Perhaps each patient brought him this pleasure. But I felt special, a 

treasure bought with silent shame. Fascinated, if also slightly repelled, I 

swallowed his “stick-with-me-kid” insinuations. When, on occasion, he 

used that patronizing cliché, he may have been playing, but irony is not 

the best dialect to use with a five-year-old excited by an idealized grown-

up. Needless to say, our habit of engaging without noting the quality of 

our interaction would have fed my dissociation of how his paternalism 

both drew and disturbed me. For instance, a year or so after I had begun 

analytic training, he said, in that off-hand macho manner he liked to af-

fect, “Theory? That’s for the geniuses. You and me, we’re mechanics, we 

stick to technique.” You will not be surprised to hear that I was struck 

dumb by his misrecognition of my interests, as well as by his splitting of 

theory and clinical work. Could he have missed my passion for theory 

manifest in my graduate anthropology career? Perhaps I had been indi-

rect, or maybe the theorist in me did not show very well (and in all likeli-

hood theories of cultural evolution did not interest him). Nor is it a secret 

that, even after 8 or 12 years of treatment, patients can still surprise us 

with unsuspected traits and interests.

You might count this as a grossly botched pre-Oedipal paternal coun-

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