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This volume is a reprint of Muriel Dimen's 2003 collection of essays composed between 1981 and 2001. This “Classic Edition” includes a new foreword by Virginia Goldner and Velleda C. Ceccoli which notes that the papers, after Dimen's untimely death in 2016, “still reverberate today” (p. xi). While Dimen expressed doubts about publishing the essays already in 2003, noting that some of them were “creaky” (p. 119), her writings prove to still be evocative and engaging pieces. Her reflections on training first as an anthropologist then as a psychoanalyst, with life-changing encounters with feminism along the way, are rich historical documents. Her life experiences capture an era in American culture, and present a compelling account of the intersection between second wave feminism and psychoanalytic thinking in the 80's and 90's.
Overall Dimen incisively, and with humor, outlines an incredibly broad intellectual vision. She weaves sexuality, intimacy and power together drawing on a nexus of psychoanalysis, feminism and social theory that runs from Foucault and Merleau-Ponty to relational and postmodern thinkers. Her training as an anthropologist is foundational; she insists we take seriously Freud's cultural theories and where we find them wanting, look for radical alternatives. Her warnings are prescient as proved by the current furious debate about the impact of racism, poverty and colonialism on both psychoanalytic theory and institutions. Dimen's subsequent interweaving of this training with her immersion in psychoanalysis grounded her in two worlds, using the conflicts and tensions between them as a goad to rethink both. Her overarching goal, repeated throughout the volume, is to deconstruct all forms of dualism. Sometimes feminism functions as a stimulating Third, offering important correctives of bedrock ideas from both her anthropological and psychoanalytic training. When psychoanalysis and feminism are “at a standoff,” Marxism appears as the Third to disrupt both