Muriel Dimen

Deconstructing difference: Gender, splitting, and transitional space

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 those of gender, in terms of the self. Using a clinical example, I speak of gender less as a determinate category than as something resembling a force field, that is, as a set of complex and shifting relations among multiple contrasts or differences. This multiplicity, in turn, generates some technical recommendations about gender and splitting. Recapturing split‐off parts of the self therefore requires inhabiting its transitional spaces, including that in which gender is not a given but is in question. Moreover, I suggest, counterintuitively, that gender identity both seals the package of self and preserves all the self must lose and thus bridges undifferentiated a...

Perversion Is Us?: Eight Notes

Perversion challenges ones 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, however, its familiar meanings fall apart at the seams, yielding new questions of theory and technique. Criteria of mental health, standards of morality, and power structures are shown to intertwine in the discourse on perversion. Recent theological and clinical work on this topic by Bach, Chasseguet-Smirgel, Kernberg, and Khan, valuable in certain ways and problematic in others, is assessed and historicized. A claim both classical and iconoclastic is made: If perversion can coexist with health, if its status as illness varies with cultural time and place, then, conversely, any sexuality may be symptomatic, or healthy. Put another way, sexuality has nothing inherently to do with mental health or mental illness.

Between Lust and libido sex, psychoanalysis, and the moment before

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 consigned it and remodels it into a new idea. The proposition is put forth that a postclassical theory of sex compatible with contemporary clinical and theoretical practice can emerge once sexuality is rethought in the ambiguous, potential space between Lust and libido.

Sexuality and Suffering, Or the Eew! Factor

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 neither psychic bedrock nor diagnostic sign, this essay examines three expired, not entirely successful, cases in which this sexual disturbance, which all clinicians, like as not have experienced at one time or another, appeared. Receiving particular attention are matters of transference-countertransference lust and erotic unknowing; racism in the clinical setting; and shame, embarrassment, and humiliation in relation to gender and sexuality.

Money, Love, and Hate: Contradiction and Paradox in Psychoanalysis

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 the paradox between love and hate. This essay takes up the question of money in the spirit of the Marx‐Freud tradition, in postmodern perspective, and through several languages, not only psychoanalysis, but social theory, anthropology, and less centrally, feminist theory as well. It addresses moneys unconscious and emotional resonance, and its cultural meanings; moneys clinical and theoretical vicissitudes in the context of cultural symbolism and economic change, as well as the class position of psychoanalysis and the psychology of class itself; and moneys relational meaning in transference and countertransference.

The Body as Rorschach

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 interdisciplinary essay—the bodymind in culture, embodiment in psychoanalytic space, and bodies in patriarchy. This splicing of psychic reality, interpersonal relatedness, and systems of power produces bodies of many kinds. The many-drafted body funds the fecund diversity of the individuality that psychoanalysis explores and cultivates, as well as imagined and imaginable possibilities of freedom necessary to protest domination.

Inside the Revolution: Power, Sex, and Technique in Freud’s “‘Wild’ Analysis”

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 sexuality and the primal crime. Using a clinical vignette, the essay argues the heterogeneity and multiplicity inherent to psychoanalysis are a gift to later generations, even if they made trouble for Freud. In celebration and critique, it examines, in effect, where Freud was and where psychoanalysis is now.

Reflections on Cure, or “I/Thou/It”

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. Cures vernacular definition is not unknown to analysts: recovery from illness, a state of well-being restored. But psychoanalysis also deems the minds heart a rupture that does not heal: if we are our scars, then there is no return to a state of continuous well-being, because none never existed. In both daily clinical life and the long run, as some clinical examples illustrate, we cannot choose between these two meanings, but must rather operate in the difficult tension, the irony, between them.

Talking Sex, Talking Gender—A Roundtable

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 field. Each of the participants prepared 1 question for each of the others. The discussion explored some of the historical areas these scholars researched as well as more current ones: the development of gender as a theoretical focus and its manifestations in social discourse now; sexual development, variance, and expression; the relations between gender and sexuality studies and the thrust of the women’s and queer liberation movements; the significance of different theoretical frameworks in understanding gender and sexuality, from traditional psychoanalytic notions to chaos theory; clinical considerations; and sexual boundary violations. This roundtable provides rare, sometimes personal, always rigorous, and illuminating snapshots of the work and the place of these minds now.

The Mystery of Hysteria and the Crossroads of Power: Commentary on Paper by Sam Gerson

“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, it is suggested, also puts paid to the classical denigration of women implicit in the very category of hysteria itself, thus advancing the psychoanalysis of power.