Introduction

An interview, not a book review. The format itself suggests a new way of understanding the project of writing. Much of Muriel Dimen's answers to Andrew Samuel's questions continue to probe, to inquire, to go deeper into the issues and concerns that animate and motivate her book Sexuality, Intimacy, Power, published by The Analytic Press in 2003.

We might see here, in this interview, in which each interlocutor asks but does not always answer a question, the very deep agenda of the book: think, ask questions. Inquiry and writing are forms of resistance. Andrew asks about the scope and operation of patriarchy. Muriel asks about sexual misery. The point is not to answer but to go on asking. Muriel's anecdotes and memories of student days make the point. The polite inquiry is an act of resistance; sometimes inquiry is a form of sanity-making in states and conditions of madness, large scale and small scale.

Very much in the spirit of Muriel's book, the interview (not an interrogation as you will see but an opening up and a standing up for) explores the complex intersection Muriel identifies as the place from which to speak. She pays attention to the intellectual tradition of psychoanalysis and human inquiry. One conclusion I take from this interview is that you can take the girl out of anthropology but not anthropology out of the girl. Muriel and Andrew together pay at