Muriel Dimen

• M.A., Ph.D., L.P.
• Adjunct Clinical Professor of Psychology at New York University

This is an edited transcript of a roundtable held in the Spring of 2012, at the invitation of the Toronto Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis, where 4 of the most important psychoanalytic thinkers in the fields of gender and sexuality, Adrienne Harris, Virginia Goldner, Muriel Dimen, and Ken Corbett, came together to discuss the state of the...

This essay situates Freud’s “‘Wild’ Analysis” in its local and global histories, even while reading it for what it can tell us about psychoanalysis now. Even as it is taken on its own terms, this essay serves also as a means to consider psychoanalysis as host to crucial tensions, its ideas and their relation to technique, its traffic in power, and...

In this transcript of a panel on the exhibit of Robert Giard’s portraits, Just as You Are, at the University of Toronto on May 4, 2012, 4 panelists approach the work politically and personally, aesthetically and psychoanalytically. Harris considers the tension in queer portraiture between intelligibility and liminality; Corbett discusses the artist...

Through a personal account, the author reflects on how we are haunted by what we take from our parents or what, unawares, they transmit to us, and how that haunting pulls us forward and back at the same time.

“Hysteria and Humiliation,” it is argued, performs a small miracle, weaving inner and outer perspectives on a seemingly mysterious condition into a clinically useful formulation. Its bold new thinking is shown to clear up many conceptual problems about the state of mind and sufferings that a diagnosis of “hysteria” usually designates. This paper, i...

Starr and Aron's paper, based on original research, bares a trauma that is as much professional as it is ethical. Their watershed insights into its origins could emerge, however, only when a certain critical mass of data and theory had accumulated. Their essay challenges the reader to confront the ethical and professional dilemma of imagining the f...

The author considers a sexual transgression that occurred in her first treatment. She deems the violation a product of the transference/countertransference matrix; of conceptual lacunae and technique poorly used; and of dangers inherent to psychoanalysis. She assesses how her dilemma and character wed her analyst’s, fashioning an analysis laced wit...

This introduction introduces the reader to the symposium With Culture in Mind. It recounts the origin of these six essays in a writing group. It shows that these essays, each of which centers on a clinical moment when the psychic and the social meet, work on two other levels as well: the critique of social and psychoanalytic theory and the assessme...

Cure is a topic much on our minds but rarely in focus. This paper probes what systematizes this protean thing called cure, hoping to open it to new meaning. It reveals cure as a moving target; illustrates several ways of putting a working definition together; and, while reflecting on three treatments, considers cure as both state and process. Cure'...

The inevitability of Cheuvront's questions issues from three ironies. First, the relational turn in psychoanalysis may be said to have the unintended consequence of putting into question the very structure it has placed at center stage: the couple. Second, as the cultural critique of heterosexual monogamy has intensified and diverse forms of intima...

Samuels interviewed Dimen in lieu of a book review for her Sexuality, Intimacy, Power. The interview was unstructured and dialogical and covered the following main topics: (a) professional issues in the field of psychoanalysis such as the relation of theory to practice and reflections on the nature and content of trainings in psychoanalysis; (b) is...

The ubiquitous Eew! Factor–an excited disgust–is layered. Its tangled experiential and constitutive dimensions unfold when the Eew! Factor is examined through the lens of sexual countertransference; sexual countertransference through affect, abjection, and intersubjectivity; and sex itself through all of them. Taking the perspective that sex is nei...

I touch briefly on my own experience of shame as triggered by what my discussants have written. I look at how shame and power interact in psychoanalytic discourse, examine their play in relation to questions of aggression and activity, and refer as well to what I am calling “an ethics of relativism.” Cautioning against uncritical binary thinking, I...

Psychoanalysis and politics intersect variously. Some psychoanalytic writings have critiqued society, whereas others have applied socially critical insights about class and race to illuminate transference- countertransference enactments and other clinical matters. The hegemonic politics of psychoanalysis, less intentional but equally influential, d...

The problem of the psychic and the social is the problem of the third, and the third is a problem of dualism. This point is illustrated with regard to both clinic and theory. The Marx/Freud synthesis is not a blending of dualities, but a site: The nexus of mental and material, at the heart of which is reflexivity, is a third site that is provisiona...

Feminism, psychoanalysis, and politics have evolved together. This paper situates their interimplicated evolution in the intellectual shift from dualism to multiplicity, from binary toward pluralism. The method used is to replace dualities with triads, to move from ‘either/or’ to ‘both/and’, to bring The Third into play. Accordingly, the tale is to...

Ruth Fallenbaum's “The Injured Worker” focuses on something that not only the quotidian routine but also the inward focus of psychoanalysis inclines us to lose sight of: that in capitalism our search for empowerment ultimately disempowers us. Alienation is the psychology of class. It shows up as demoralization, shame, and inflamed psychesomas. It i...

I reflect on the psychoanalytic and political and personal meaning—opr meaninglessness—of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.

Perversion challenges one’s intellect, passion, clinical practice, and cultural and personal values. As a topic, it also generates anxiety—a problem addressed in this paper by an experimental literary format. Perversion is conventionally deemed a self-evident, pathological entity. From the perspective on multiplicity and discontinuity taken here, h...

Reinterpreted from one end of the century to the other, the psychoanalytic body situates theoretical debate, dispute, and change. Originally and starkly biological and sexual, it has all along carried other, often discordant meanings. Now, in the postclassical era, we are equipped to redraft the classical body. Three perspectives intercut in this i...

Recent contributions to the psychoanalytic literature suggest that the classical focus on psychosexuaiity has been lost. This charge is both wrong and right. After briefly surveying the evolution of psychoanalytic thinking on sexuality and reviewing the concept of libido, this essay retrieves the word Lust from the footnotes to which Freud consigne...

The way analysts talk, behave, and feel in relation to money is replete with an uneasiness that is the surface manifestation of a deep, psychocultural contradiction between money and love that cannot be thought, willed, or wished away. For the clinical project to succeed, this contradiction can and must find a temporary, reparative resolution in th...

Reviews the book, Sexual personae: Art and decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson by Camille Paglia (see record 1990-97051-000). The provocative style in which Sexual Personae is written tempts one to abandon scholarly etiquette and reply in kind (and, indeed, should this essay occasionally succumb to temptation, I hope the essayist will be fo...

Apparently a straightforward elaboration of anatomical difference, “gender”; is symbolically tied to many kinds of cultural representations, which, in turn, set the terms not only for understanding the relations between women and men but for organizing self‐experience. Consequently, problems of self may come to be coded in terms of gender, and thos...

1. Full data for references will be found at the end of the article. The field research in 1967-68 was supported by a Predoctoral Research Fellowship No. 5 F01 MH 3283403 and Grant MH 13, 622-01, CUAN from the National Institute of Mental Health. I thank Peter Allen and Jill Dubisch for constructive criticisms of an earlier draft of this paper. 2....

Robert T. Anderson. Traditional Europe: A Study in Anthropology and History. Belmont, California: Wadsworth Publishing Company, Inc., 1971. 195 pp. $4.95. Modern Europe: An Anthropological Perspective. Pacific Palisades, California: Goodyear Publishing Company, Inc., 1973. 163 pp. $4.50. Denmark: Success of a Developing Nation. Cambridge, Mass.: Sc...

Examines the intersection of embodiment and enactment in postclassical psychoanalytic theory and practice in order to address some underconsidered questions about the intra-psychic and the inter-personal. The author presents a subtheme of the resonance between clinical and theoretical practice, in which theoretical reference is global while focus o...

Thesis--Columbia University. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 292-298). Microfilm of typescript.