Inspired by the clinical and ethical contributions of Muriel Dimen, Social Aspects of Sexual Boundary Trouble goes beyond the established consensus that sexual boundary violations (SBV) constitute a serious breach of professional ethics, in order to explore the cultural and historical implications of their chronic persistence. This collection shatters normative professional guidelines by focusing on the complicity and hypocrisy of professional groups, while at the same time raising the taboo subject of the ordinary practicing clinician’s unconscious professional ambivalence and potentially rogue sexual subjectivity.
Key Features
- Explores the cultural and historical implications of sexual boundary violations.
- Challenges the psychoanalytic profession to address issues of ethical rigor and depth.
- Uncovers the roots of SBV in the institutional origins and history of psychoanalysis.
- Relevant to specialists in psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, critical theory, feminist studies, and social thought.
Additional Information
In Rotten Apples and Ambivalence, her last major publication, Dimen (2016) maintained that "the phenomenon of sexual transgression between analyst and patient . . . is insufficiently addressed so long as it is only deemed psychological." Social Aspects of Sexual Boundary Trouble explores Dimen’s concept of the psychoanalytic "primal crime," which is in some ways constitutive of the profession, and the inherently unstable nature of interpersonal and professional "boundaries." This work breaks new ground in the continuing struggle of psychoanalysis to reconcile itself with its liminal social status and its origins as a subversive, morally ambiguous practice.
