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Sexual boundary violations ferry analysts and patients from thought to action, from the symbolic toward the materiality of life. They bring the outside in. Yes, they are enactments of fantasy. At the same time, though, sexual transgressions are workings of power and vehicles of culture. They evoke the social context for psychoanalysis, its rules, politics, and disciplinary power, its ethics committees, the legal systems that license and regulate training and clinicians, define and punish breaches of sexual boundaries by the licensed. Sexual boundary violations make trouble for any group. And they are a problem of the group too.
Most psychoanalytic thinking about this problem tends to take an inside view. I am going to do so too, but I am also going to view it from the outside in. Thinking as an anthropologist, I consider psychoanalysis an institution that, like any other social unit, has a structure, history, rules, and beliefs. Since, I am, of course, an insider, I can in no way claim objectivity. Nor would I want to. But my frame in this paper is different: a multiperspectival approach to this enigma, a position I am naturally