Editors’ Introduction

Muriel Dimen led Studies in Gender and Sexuality for 10 years, from 2006 until her death in February 2016. She was a tireless and inspirational editor-in-chief while also a prolific author, teacher, clinical supervisor, and psychoanalyst. She was also a dear and devoted friend and mentor.

To mark the year since her passing, we invited a group of Dimen’s colleagues to celebrate her vision with a reflection on some aspect of her work that has inspired their own. Our authors were moved to comment on just how very much Dimen inspired them personally too. Although this collection is by no means a definitive assessment of Dimen’s work, we hope it offers something of a portrait of Dimen’s influence on writers who work at the intersection of gender, sexuality, and psychoanalysis. No doubt readers will also learn how very deeply Muriel Dimen loved her field, her family and friends, her students, her colleagues, her patients, her supervisees—as she addressed them collectively in her writing Us—and how very deeply Us loved her.

We are grateful to Taylor & Francis and to Psychoanalytic Dialogues for allowing us to republish one of Dimen’s most influential papers as part of this memorial, “Inside the Revolution: Power, Sex, and Technique in Freud’s “‘Wild’ Analysis” (2014). When Dimen first presented the essay in a keynote address to the American Psychological Association Division (39) of Psychoanalysis meeting in Chicago in April, 2010, she asked what psychoanalysis would be like were we collectively and self-reflectively able to recoup some of the wild exuberance with which psychoanalysis launched. Responding to the published version of the paper in Psychoanalytic Dialogues, Adam Phillips (2014, p. 250) lamented that Dimen hadn’t quite reached an answer to this unsolvable problem in her exploration of “Wild Analysis.” Based on Dimen’s keen interweaving of the literature, clinical practice, and our group life he concluded, “She would be one of the best people to tell us.”