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In her prologue to her newest book, Muriel Dimen describes her personal odyssey from ‘duality to multiplicity’ in relation to the matter of gender. Her professional context shaped by social theory, feminism and psychoanalysis, Dimen has sought, during some twenty years of writing, teaching and clinical practice, to find a means of transcending the binaries that ‘commit us to reductions or determinisms’. The chapters of her book, organized in four parts, directly engage the problem and elaborate the journey as a where we’ve been, where we are now and where we might go. In the fourth and final section, Dimen adds to her discussion specific case material around gender, women and aggression, and sexual perversion.
Sexuality, Intimacy and Power is primarily an appeal to deconstruct the still operative classic psychoanalytic notions of gender, sexual normality and developmental theory. The latter is translated, the author asserts, into a reproduction-oriented narrative in which ‘females become women, males become men, and the dance of their development is a heterosexual pairing’. Such notions are rooted, she says, in the determinism of adaptationist Darwinism and Cartesian dualities of subject-mind, body-object. Moreover, says Dimen, such notions are consistent with the ‘family values’ ideology that emerged in the eighties and nineties as a defence against women's and gay liberation, the sexual revolution and any kind of sexual multiplicity. Dimen challenges the paradigm of woman's gender as passive, nurturing and socially responsible for relationship, man's gender as that which acts and preys. Gender, Dimen insists, ‘is more complex, multiple and discontinuous than stereotype allows’ and any assumption of what masculinity or femininity is to a clinical patient ‘forecloses multiplicity’. Dimen argues that we must ‘destabilize, decenter, shake up our idea of gender, just as we once revolutionized our ideas about woman's place’.
Jungians might assume they have long been with