Social Aspects of Sexual Boundary Trouble in Psychoanalysis: Responses to the Work of Muriel Dimen, edited by Charles Levin,  Routledge, Abingdon and New York, 2021,  244 pp.

This important volume builds upon the late Muriel Dimen's 2011 article “Lapsus Linguae, or A Slip of the Tongue: A Sexual Violation in an Analytic Treatment and its Personal and Theoretical Aftermath” (Dimen, 2011). Dimen's description of her analyst's boundary violation, and the decades-long shadow it cast, is foundational reading for the current volume even though it is not included. The specific launching point for this volume is her insistence in that article on the social context of boundary violations. They are not isolated cases of psychoanalysts behaving poorly, but instead are built into the fabric of the psychoanalysis. The volume offers a range of stark theoretical explanations for the inevitability of violations, along with specific suggestions for better practices. The articles are arranged with an introduction by Charles Levin (Chapter 1), a new Dimen article on boundary violations (Chapter 2), then a section on Social Aspects of Violations (Chapters 3-6), a section Locating the Psycho-sexual Boundary (Chapters 7-10) and finally an interview with Dimen (Chapter 11). This review focuses first on some of the theoretical issues raised and then turns to the practical suggestions.

Dimen's contribution (Chapter 2) briefly reviews two social scientific theoretical models for breaches of conduct. First, Mary Douglas posits that every society has a classification system that organizes society and determines, for example, the social understanding of a weed as a plant out of place (Douglas, 1966). These systems inescapably produce anomalies that defy classification and thus lead to both pollution and the need for rituals of purification. Douglas' work revolutionized the study of pollution and purity systems. Dimen does little with this model beyond a general reference to Douglas' emphasis on boundaries. None of the other authors return to Douglas either.

Second, Dimen mentions Emil Durkheim's astute analysis of the role of the sacred in society. Notions of the sacr