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In the latest issue of JAPA, Daria Colombo (2023, p. 259) advocates the use of autotheory, a literary genre wherein an author reflects upon her own embodiment “to enact or depict the unceasing interplay of relational experience and theory that forms subjectivity.” Developed on the page, enacted in the frame, and theorized in the embeddedness of clinical process, autotheory is tasked with holding “the developing psychoanalytic process, in parallel to the ways in which autotheoretical texts hold and expose the structuring and expression of subjectivity and articulate the ongoing interplay of body and mind” (p. 269).
For readers of Muriel Dimen, this is not news. Colombo lists Dimen among the feminist psychoanalysts who wove autobiography into relational technique. Unlike Dimen, Colombo (2023, p. 269) focuses almost exclusively upon “the subject doing the framing” whereupon autotheory illustrates how we do our work. Colombo understands that when we frame (Hartman, 2018), we reveal how the setting is “constitutionally political, in a feminist, the-personal-is-political manner.” Yet in her autotheoretical attention to our work (2023, p. 267), Colombo underestimates the significance of Dimen’s stalwart attention to our words.
Dimen always linked the body’s position in theory to its lexicality in social discourse. She crafted autotheoretical vignettes when the words and theories available to her seemed doomed to reproduce the obvious or replicate the sanctity of closed-loop theorizing. We read Dimen wrestling with gendered and sexed qualities of virtue signaling (1989), internalized homophobia and racism (1986), monstrosity (Buckberg & Kaywin, 2023; Dimen, 2005), Rotten Apples (2011, 2016), and ghosting (2023) before we registered them in common usage.
In Deconstructing Difference: Gender, Splitting, and the Transitional Space (Dimen, 1991; as in Dimen, 2003 1994), Dimen scans her sexed and gendered body to mark a lacuna in the gender binary lest our work erase it.
Writes Dime