Review of Reading with Muriel Dimen/Writing with Muriel Dimen: Experiments in Theorizing a Field, edited by Stephen Hartman.  Routledge, 2023.

Back in 2010, the head of the American Psychoanalytic Association was sued by a former patient with whom he had had a sexual relationship. It occurred while she was in a training analysis with him; she was a candidate at the institute where he taught. When the lawsuit came to light, the analyst resigned from the directorship of the American, and turned-in his license to practice medicine.

This was about 14 years ago. Today if you do a search with the analyst’s name and relevant terms on PEP you will find nothing in the literature about this case. Nor if you Google it. If you enter his name and some relevant terms into ChatGPT, it will tell you that there’s no record of him resigning from APsA. Instead it will list a few of his papers, and then say “He seems to be a respected and influential figure in the field of psychoanalysis.”

Muriel Dimen was interested in how weird things can get when psychoanalysts try to think about Sexual Boundary Violations (SBVs). Dimen herself was the victim of an SBV by her analyst when she was in her twenties. She felt that she was damaged by it, and she spent decades trying to use her own experience to help psychoanalysts understand how these events keep happening.

Dimen’s contribution was influential in moving SBVs to the center of psychoanalytic discourse. But she never felt that she was deeply understood or appreciated for this contribution. In fact, she was often questioned, shunned, disinvited and silenced by her colleagues and

friends in the field. This, in turn, led Dimen to write, courageously, about feeling silenced and ostracized in the field that she was persistently and carefully trying to help.

This volume of Dimen’s collected works tries to grapple with how someone so insightful, lucid and brave, and whose contribution was so enormous, could end up feeling so discarded. Stephen Hartman, who edited this volume, was appointed by Dimen before her death in 2016 to produce her collected papers.