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Muriel Dimen, an anthropologist by academic training, is now a practising psychoanalyst, a member of the New York University Post Doctoral Program, the editor of Studies in Gender and Sexuality, and an associate editor of Psychoanalytic Dialogues. In 2003 she published Sexuality, Intimacy, Power, a collection of essays written during the preceding thirteen years.
The introduction Dimen wrote for this impressive collection presents its main themes, gives a rationale for how and why these articles fit together, and situates her work in an unfolding series of theoretical controversies relating to how gender is viewed in contemporary psychoanalysis. She is concerned with “the triple crossroad of psychoanalysis, feminism, and social theory”—areas that roughly correspond to the triptych in her title: sexuality (feminism), intimacy (psychoanalysis), power (social theory), or in other words, body, mind, and culture.
Within psychoanalysis, Dimen locates herself as “relational,” which she defines as a theory and practice embracing object relations in all its iterations—classical, post- classical, interpersonal theory, self psychology, and intersubjectivity. (Dimen does not, however, subscribe to interpersonalism, which she views as not mindful enough of the complexity of intrapsychic life.) Her approach to social theory and feminism is “postmodern,” which means that she rejects single causation, dualism, and reductionism; that she mixes medium and message; and that she “advocates paradox, over-determinism, both/and thinking (versus either/or), uncertainty, fragmentation, heterogeneity, multiplicity and difference.” Postmodern, as Dimen describes it, stands in contrast to the positivistic materialism of the early twentieth century, and to the modernism that followed after the First World War, with its technocentrism, rationalism, and commitment to “absolute truth.” Postmoderism was, and is, a reaction to the chaos, carnage, and disappointments of the times of materialism and of