Muriel Dimen: Teacher, Mentor, Psychoanalytic Scholar

ABSTRACT

This essay is split in content and intent. In the first part, I share my reflections from my long personal relationship with Muriel Dimen, who taught, supervised, and mentored me as a young candidate and beginning scholar. In this part, I try convey how staunch and thorough her commitment, how extraordinary her generosity was in supporting the intellectual development of a new generation of emerging psychoanalytic thinkers and theorists.

The second part, written in an entirely different tone, takes on the body of work Dimen produced in the last decade of her life, which focused on sexual boundary violations. This work highlights the hybridity of her thinking and the brilliance of her mind. I flesh out the genealogy of her reflections on this topic and discuss in some depth how her last, posthumously published paper changes the terms of the conversation in this very difficult matter. In this topic, as she had previously done in many others, Dimen’s contribution introduced an entirely novel way to think about the recalcitrant problem of sexual abuses in the consulting room.

Notes

¹ At the time I joined the group was comprised of Orna Guralnik, Glenys Lobban, Olga Pugachevsky, Eyal Rozmarin, and Maura Sheehy. Stephen Hartman, one of the members of the original group, had recently relocated to San Francisco and left the group whereas Tracy Simon joined the group a few months later. This, of course, was only one of a few such writing groups that Muriel ran over the years. All these groups nourished the development of important analytic thinkers who have authored significant papers—some of which were published in the volume edited by Dimen (2011).

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Notes on contributors

Avgi Saketopoulou

Avgi Saketopoulou, Psy.D., is faculty at the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, National Institute for the Psychotherapies (NIP), and the Stephen Mitchell Relational Center. She is on the board of Psychoanalytic Dialogues, Studies in Gender and Sexuality, and the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association.