Lapsus Linguae, or A Slip of the Tongue?

Abstract

Sexual boundary violations are as old as psychoanalysis itself. Yet, although this professional, intellectual, clinical, and personal dilemma is receiving more attention in the literature, it endures. Do analysts not want to think or talk about it? Is our shared shame, or even ambivalence, in the way? Is the primal crime inherently unstoppable? The author examines her own experience of a sexual boundary violation from clinical and theoretical perspectives. Locating her analyst's transgression in its 1970s cultural history, the article attempts to decipher what led up to it: What did the analyst do and not do, say and not say? How did the analyst's character combust with her author's to produce a conflagration about which the analyst never spoke and the author/patient remained silent for thirty years? And under what circumstances can the damage inflicted by such an ethical lapse be transformed?

Keywords:

• Silence
• enactment
• erotic countertransference
• feminism
• patriarchy
• ethics

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Muriel Dimen

Muriel Dimen, Ph.D., is Adjunct Clinical Professor of Psychology at New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. A Fellow at the New York Institute for the Humanities, New York University, Muriel Dimen practices in Manhattan and supervises nationally.