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MURIEL DIMEN, Ph.D.
ability symbolizes the limit they long for, the incest prohibition observed
in heart and/or body. They aim to redo a vital if bungled childhood pro-
cess, not to self-destroy.
They seek their own desire. They want not to be able to have their
parent(s), despite a mutual longing (Samuels, 1985, p. 168), so as to be
left with nothing but their own private desire in all its differentiating,
lonely pain and hope. Unfortunately, if, as an adult, you try this “do-
over” with lovers whose self-restraint in service of your growth neither
can nor ought to be expected, you may waste a lot of time. You are bet-
ter off in therapy. Even so, the repair is hard—Freud (1937) sometimes
thought it impossible—and to have it reinflicted by that selfsame profes-
sional is a terrible betrayal of psychoanalysis’s promise. Apropos my
marital problems, Dr. O once quoted Othello, who says of himself (after
he has been apprehended for killing his wife): “one that lov’d not wisely
but too well.” Why didn’t he apply that to us?
Splitting the Difference
If, when I was in treatment with Dr. O, he was big and I was little, now
our positions are reversed: in the analyst’s chair (literally and figura-
tively), I can observe and assess him from a position of authority. That
my work with him made this reversal possible is ironic. Curiously, it was
in the very (academic) year of the initial transgression that I began to
consider becoming an analyst. It has taken me a long time, and the writ-
ing of this article, to understand what will have been immediately obvi-
ous to the reader: Becoming an analyst was one gigantic save. I had
placed all my faith and trust in this man. In our first five years, I mourned
my mother with him. During the fourth, I endured a year-long walking
breakdown, in the latter part of which my father died. So when, 18
months after that death, Dr. O’s lapse revealed his untrustworthiness, I
had nowhere to go. My real father gone, I had only his disappointing
stand-in. I could not bear the pain, which I could begin to register only
after I ended my 30-year silence. In retrospect, I see that I was stuck: I
lacked the internal structure to engage full-on the heartbreak, anger, and
disillusionment that would have rushed in had I relinquished whatever
guilty pleasure keeping that incestuous secret had bestowed.
So I leapt. I split the difference—choosing to change jobs, I left Dr. O
without leaving him. Call it my own private Oedipal resolution. Finessing
the gendered snares faced by a girl working her way out of the Oedipal
funhouse, I chose to take him at his word and reach for the phallus my-
SEXUAL VIOLATION IN AN ANALYTIC TREATMENT
63
self. I was going to do what he did. But I was also going to do what I did.
I was going to be an analyst, like him, and I was also going to continue
what I was already doing, which is writing and speaking about what mat-
tered to me. Indeed, even though I did not publish my first clinical article
until about 15 years after I’d begun training (Dimen, 1991), my literary
life gathered steam as new ideas, topics, and genres found their way to
me.
This radical shift had a rational context: by this time, I was becoming
disenchanted with my first profession. Although my awe for anthropol-
ogy endures, by 1973 my zeal to share its wonders with students was
waning. At the same time, psychoanalysis was working its transforma-
tional magic. Early in college, it had flashed on me, while reading
Durkheim (1930), that life’s jumble could be decrypted. Just so, as a pa-
tient, I quickly saw, with poignant clarity, that the mind’s mishmash held
meaning too. Add to that an excitingly systematic way to think about
women and desire—despite the feminist anti-Freudianism of the time, it
was plain to me that psychoanalysis was just what the doctor ordered
(Dimen, 2003)—and I was hooked.
Did my embrace of psychoanalysis permit me to identify with, differ-
entiate from, and (even) exceed Dr. O? Yes, but that’s not the whole
story. As my analysis heated up, Dr. O’s support was helping me become
more intellectually confident and active. Inspired by his favorite image,
Prometheus’s theft of fire, and willing to incur its risks (striving for the
phallus always fails), I deployed my gains not only in the academy. Even
as I lay on the couch, I had climbed onto the barricades; weirdly enough,
I entered psychoanalysis in the same year as I joined my first conscious-
ness-raising group. Throughout my treatment, women’s liberation, as I
have hinted, served as a parallel home. So as, in Dr. O’s office, I was both
kindling and damping my own speech, my voice was already shifting
into new registers in the study groups, protest politics, and (academic)
thinking that have marked second-wave feminism. Sisterhood’s righteous
and unstinting, if also sometimes rivalrous (Buhle, 1998), encouragement
empowered me to speak out even as Dr. O’s office rang with the sounds
of silence.
For me, psychoanalysis and feminism were not either/or. I needed
both. It would be banal to say that feminism was the protective mother
intervening in paternal incestuousness. Movements such as psychoanaly-
sis and feminism do not work like that. Furthermore, each of these, even
if historical antagonists, carried similar hopes for the self and for change