Pleasure and Danger: An Appreciation of Muriel Dimen

ABSTRACT

In this essay I recall a 40-year experience knowing and working with Muriel Dimen. This is a reminiscence of a shared activist life in the late 1970s and 1980s and later our lives emerging in psychoanalysis and relational psychoanalysis after the mid-1980s. It is an appreciation of the particular turns and potent hot spots in Muriel Dimen’s evolving theorizing of sexuality and power, body and gender and culture from this point in the mid-1980s to her death in 2016.

Notes

¹ The Gang of Four, our homage no doubt to Maoism before disillusions. Originally Muriel Dimen, Jessica Benjamin, Virginia Goldner, and myself. It occurs to me only now that rather like the original Maoist gang, we too went through splits and exiles and changing cast of characters.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Adrienne Harris

Adrienne Harris, Ph.D., is faculty and supervisor at the New York University Postdoctoral Program and at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California. She is the author of Gender as Soft Assembly (TAP, 2005).