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

50 

MURIEL DIMEN, Ph.D.

tertransference (Benjamin, 1988), but I think we were in the Oedipal 

bramble as well (Cooper 2003). Dr. O’s ignorance of a central aspect of 

my intelligence dashed my hopes for the meeting of minds that never 

took place with my father. Certainly his creation of a hierarchy between 

the intellectual and clinical practices of psychoanalysis—his splitting—

put me in a bind. Pulled toward the “us” he made of him and me, and 

away from the “them” he proposed we were not, I found no space clear 

of shame. To have accepted his characterization of “our” interest in tech-

nique meant to gain mutuality with him but disown what I valued in 

myself (the theory part), which was a loss akin to the shame of defi-

ciency (Stein, 1997). But to have claimed the theory side at that precise 

moment would have been to claim genius, risk the shame of excess 

(Stein, 1997), and lose him. Thrilled to be among the honest elect, if also 

humbled and embarrassed to join the laborers (my class mobility was 

not irrelevant to this treatment), I elected neither to interrupt his inverse 

snobbery nor to damage his pride: I declined to observe what I un-

knowingly apprehended—how his narcissism disguised his intellectual 

self-doubts.

Dr. O took no interest whatsoever in analyzing the Oedipal transfer-

ence/countertransference, only in enacting it. From time to time towards 

the end of my treatment, I would complain: “But we’ve never really 

talked about my father.” No response. I dreamt of a man in a Speedo 

with a mesh crotch. This reference to barely veiled male genitalia would 

surely, I thought, lead us to my father, sexuality, and, I see now, the 

erased enactment, not to mention Dr. O’s other narcissistic self-display. 

Nothing. I did not know how to push it further. All I recall is a later, 

rather mad prediction he made as if in reply: “One day, you’ll dream 

about a desirable man, maybe at a conference, and he will be your 

desire.”

II. Desire and the Incest Taboo

However much Dr. O might have helped me (re)start my fire, he often 

stood in its light. Invigorated, perhaps, by the patriarchal dialectic ani-

mating us, he rarely left me alone-while-being-held to discover my de-

sire’s vicissitudes. Instead, in a mutually exciting way, he inserted himself 

into my lack (Lacan, 1966; Bernstein, 2006). Clotting my desire with his, 

he generated a holding pattern—a psychological incest—in which we 

hung in a sort of suspended animation for far too long. It is futile, if ir-

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SEXUAL VIOLATION  IN AN ANALYTIC TREATMENT 

51

resistible, to wish he had done things differently. Still the longing for 

what might have been can inspire a search for what could be. In what 

follows, I will assess Dr. O’s Oedipal failure. Although he and I did not—

could not—talk about it then, now I can delve into that atmosphere thick 

with longing, frustration, and shame by using some new ideas about de-

sire, Oedipus, and incest.

Dumbshows of Desire

Desire is about longing, not having. It may be sweet or poignant or ter-

rible. But without it, one is as without appetite. And its preservation is 

accomplished, at least in part, by the prohibition on incest. Desire entails 

several paradoxes, and it seems useful to lay them out here because they 

manifested so oddly and silently in my treatment with Dr. O. Chief among 

these is desire’s ambiguous location both between and within those who 

feel it. Claude Lévi-Strauss (1949, p. 12) mines the irony: desire, he apho-

rizes, is our “only instinct requiring the stimulation of another person.” 

The relational version might be that desire emerges in relationship but, 

belonging to the child alone, survives only if lightly held, even benignly 

neglected, by the authorized caretaker(s).

2

Eluding the neat binary between one-person and two-person psychol-

ogies, desire centers a tricky debate that one must enter, if perhaps, as 

Levenson (1994) writes, with trepidation. In one-person terms, desire 

seems to spring full-blown in intrapsychic process, almost a species char-

acteristic. In the linguistically-based Lacanian view, it emerges as a con-

sequence of the failure of speech, of the gap between the Imaginary and 

the Symbolic. From a two-person vantage point, however, desire turns 

out to be oddly intersubjective. Lacan (1966), in turn, mindful of Lévi-

Strauss’s assessment of desire’s doubleness, situates its origin in a relation 

that is, all the same, not quite a relationship: as the yearning to be the 

object of the (m)Other’s desire, it emerges in pre-Oedipal (maternal) in-

timacy, a nexus situated, however, in the presymbolic Imaginary. Leven-

son (1994) would have it both ways, insisting that “desire requires 

2

 As Freud (1913) already knew, it is vital to locate the incest taboo in culture. Outside psy-

choanalysis, the incest prohibition has been variously theorized. Evolutionary biology 

deems it an adaptive mechanism, because genetic inbreeding generally endangers species 

survival. With marriage and kinship as subtext, anthropology argues that the taboo, by 

sanctioning particular sexual and procreative relations, forces families to intermarry, 

thereby, in Lévi-Strauss’s (1949) view, weaving the bonds of society itself or, from other 

angles, at least darning them. Thus, transmitting and/or maintaining the incest prohibition 

becomes a social function that might be dubbed a sexual third.

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