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Muriel died in 2016 — more than 7 years ago. But it remains impossible for me, even now, to take up the ambitions and historic accomplishments of her paper without first declaring how much she would have wanted to be here – how delighted she would have been to think hard and collaboratively with an old friend about her early work.
Even though her essay, Deconstructing Difference: Gender, Splitting, and Transitional Space was written over 30 years ago, well before Muriel had developed her uniquely emotionalized writer’s voice, her text acted on me, bringing me back to a felt sense of the communal electricity of thought that was sparking at the time. This is because Muriel wasn’t working alone, even though she was writing alone. She was one of four – Adrienne Harris, Jessica Benjamin and myself, all candidates or recent graduates at NYU Postdoc, who comprised a small women’s group that had been meeting for years. When Psychoanalytic Dialogues was launched, each of us was given the chance to write our first big paper on gender – to be published in the inaugural volume of the journal (thanks to the generosity of Stephen Mitchell, Dialogues’ first editor, who was prompted by Adrienne who had become part of Mitchell’s editorial inner circle in the early years of relational psychoanalysis).
Giving gender pride of place in this way meant that gender became positioned at the core of relational psychoanalysis, making Dialogues an early site where clinical psychoanalysis, a practice-based knowledge system, could meet up with feminism, a theory-based practice. This moment of theory turned out to be one of “spontaneous combustion” for the four of us, because unbeknownst to each other, we all deployed many of the same intellectual strategies to unpack gender’s psychic action (especially “deconstruction”), and more remarkably, we each crafted closely related compound idioms to capture the paradoxical indeterminacy of gender’s inherent character – its reality/unreality.
In the paper