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

56 

MURIEL DIMEN, Ph.D.

fessional kin, perhaps being the object of patients’ (unregistered) unre-

quited love/lust is as gratifying as sexual intercourse itself.

Intersubjectivizing Oedipus

So maybe civilization begins when parents (not, pace Freud [1913], the 

siblings) recant their incestuous desire. By tradition, the incest taboo is 

read through the Oedipal drama, which stars a unique subject of desire, 

a child who must single-handedly manage triangulated love and hate 

(Freud, 1913, 1924). To be sure, the father has a supporting role, for he 

disrupts the (incestuous) mother-son merger so as to redirect the boy’s 

desire away from his mother (and father) toward a future mate.

3

 But, in 

this classical account, the parental objects otherwise lack subjectivity. 

Postclassical revision, in contrast, thickens the Oedipal plot, recognizing 

that insofar as the play is only internal, it tells but part of the story. Fair-

bairn (1954) and, to a lesser extent, Kohut (1977) cue the dyad: The child 

is not onstage alone. Front and center are the parents as subjects; their 

pleasure, inhering as it does in object-relation, influencing if not generat-

ing the child’s.

Erasing sexuality from the equation, however, this quiet revolution 

overcorrected, a problem remedied by later relational revisions, espe-

cially Davies (1994, 1998, 2003) and Cooper (2003). Not only do these 

new narratives resexualize the Oedipal child, they also recognize that 

parental sexual desire circulates in the family field altogether. The classi-

3

 I remain uneasy with the classical implication that mothers, or women, cannot self-regu-

late. The notion of father as principal moral guardian is troubling. Although I understand 

that Freud and Lacan claim to describe and account for the intrapsychic process by which 

the turbulent triangular space is traversed, I cannot help being distracted by the sociology: 

the prevalence of father/daughter incest, which is the most common sort of intergenera-

tional intrafamilial sex (Turner, 1996). So if the paternal principle is deemed to interrupt the 

Imaginary in which mothers’ and children’s unboundaried incestuous desire flourishes, 

nevertheless the relative frequency of paternal incest suggests that fathers might have a bit 

more difficulty actually regulating their own incestuous acts. Likewise, even if one accepts 

a woman’s place in the psychic interior as a signifier for absence, women still have a sub-

jective life. By definition, then, mothers are capable of self-reflection and hence self-regula-

tion (Benjamin, 1988; Ruddick, 1980). And, if the lesser frequency of maternal incest is any 

indication, their capacity for self-awareness and self-management might very well mean 

that their need for the regulating father has been exaggerated, thank you very much. Per-

haps it is only my experience with Dr. O that makes me want to consider incestuous desire 

at once unconsciously motivated, subjectively experienced, and intersubjectively (and so-

cially) lived. But I do not think that is the only reason I would prefer a narrative that allows 

for both interiority and intersubjectivity, dyads as well as triads, and for parental self-regu-

lation in relation to the incest taboo, itself seen as a Third (Benjamin, 2006) that both con-

textualizes parent-child relations and permeates adult psychic process.

---

SEXUAL VIOLATION  IN AN ANALYTIC TREATMENT 

57

cal model has the Oedipal parent (i.e., the father) aiming to preserve his 

conjugal rights (which reads as a power move as well). But, according to 

this construction, the father does not reciprocate: he does not surrender 

his desire for his son as his son forsakes his desire for the parents. Post-

classical models, in contrast, redraft the Oedipal story by construing both 

desire and its renunciation as intersubjective. Together, Oedipal adult 

and child forswear their mutual sexual desire, with the former facilitating 

the latter’s renunciation.

Costarring in these emergent Oedipal narratives, therefore, are the par-

ents and their sexual desire, whose underexplored and possibly even 

buried psychoanalytic history (Balmary, 1979; Krüll, 1979; Masson, 1984) 

contains a puzzle or two. Some archeological work being in order, I 

wonder whether some light might be shed if, heuristically, we were to 

divide the Oedipus from the incest taboo, using them as twin lenses 

through which we could view the same drama? If, that is, we consider 

the Oedipus as speaking to children, could we construe the incest taboo 

as addressing adults, even while we view both processes as concurrent 

and interpenetrating? This stereoscopic view might amend a lacuna in 

the new narratives, whose perhaps necessary tendency to occlude a triad 

in favor of a dyad two-dimensionalizes a three-dimensional process.

As I see it, the Oedipus, a developmental crucible, infuses a nascent 

psyche with a particular genre of desire in a triangular space. At the same 

time, the ban on incest embargoes the materialization of adults’ desire in 

dyadic relation to their children (and, in the background, to the other 

parent). Possibly delivering a developmental torque of its own, the incest 

prohibition addresses substantially formed beings, the adults in charge 

who, adept at personal and intersubjective multitasking, can hold the 

other(s) in mind without erasing the self; tend relationships (dyadic, tri-

adic, multiple) without the self-sacrifice from which children need pro-

tection; and, in fact, find this juggling act self-enhancing (a partial job 

description for analyst and parent alike; see Cooper, 2003; Davies, 1998, 

2003).

These twin injunctions on desire’s realization are interimplicated, their 

accomplishment is interdependent. The Oedipal fiat demands that one 

abjure the fantasy of sexual and personal completion with one’s parent(s). 

But one cannot achieve this loss without the parental willingness to en-

dure the complementary loss (Davies, 1998, 2003), that is, to tolerate and 

grow from the suffering caused by the ban on materializing one’s sexual 

desire for one’s child (a submission implicit in Loewald, 1980). This inter-

---