Words Are Her Legacy: Remembering Muriel Dimen

ABSTRACT

Muriel Dimen is remembered as a writer who spoke first-person in a third-person world. She was not content with traditional scholarly narrative and turned instead to auto-theory experiments that blended theory, clinical case material, fiction, and memoir.     

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.     

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.     

I/I-Thou/It: Muriel Dimen as Clinician

ABSTRACT

Drawing upon Muriel Dimen’s paper “Reflections on Cure, or ‘I/Thou/It’” (2010) as my primary point of reference and departure, I attempt to characterize her style of clinical thinking and of her clinical questionings of herself, analytic practices, and the consequences of theoretical predilections. Central to Dimen’s considerations in these clinical essays are reflections on termination, self-analysis, the limits of the two-person model, the therapist’s narcissistic vulnerability, sexuality, and the body.     

Happy Memories of Muriel Dimen and Her Ethos of Meta-Practice

ABSTRACT

In Muriel Dimen’s way of living, the realms of love, friendship, thought, politics, work, and play were all interrelated in her personal ethos. Drawing on every aspect of her experience, she developed a kind of meta-practice that could well serve as a model for the psychoanalytic profession.     

Danger Talk in Psychoanalysis: Things I Learned From Muriel Dimen

Danger talk is a symbolic elaboration of our sense of otherness as we perceive it in ourselves or others (to the extent that these can be distinguished). It can be wonderfully creative and sexy; but it can also serve the aim of mass stultification, as in the recent shutting down of American psychic life in order to accommodate 1 ridiculous man and the criminal sycophants who invented him. Unfortunately, the destructive form of danger talk is inherent in our concept of ourselves as “the human species.” It mobilizes signifiers that “sublimate” fight-flight-freeze responses into fancy discourses about our superiority to animals, vegetables, and minerals. Among the many things Muriel Dimen taught me, she helped me to understand how this variation on the absurdity of human self-love has contributed to the ethical failure of the psychoanalytic profession to take responsibility for the exploitation of patients.     

Good,Bad, and Captive Samaritans:

This paper adds-in pregnancy and consent to the abortion debate in the context of good samaritan arguments initiated by Judith Jarvis Thomson. Drawing upon legal and medical definitions, the abortion issue is reframed as the right of a woman to consent to what will be done to her body by the fetus rather than her right merely to choose what to do with her own body. This argument shifts abortion rights from the right to decisional autonomy established in Roe to the right to bodily integrity affirmed by samaritan case law. As a result, we see why women who are pregnant without their consent, in effect, are captive samaritans, a status unsubstantiated by either legislative statutes or legal precedents. Recasting abortion as a response to nonconsensual pregnancy opens new grounds guaranteeing women's reproductive rights.     

The Good, the Bad, and the Social: On Living as an Answerable Agent

This article describes answerability, a fundamental component of social reason and action. "Holding answerable" and "being answerable" are characterized in terms of their roles in the drama of human relations, and our general tendency to anticipate answerable, rather than ethical, behavior in situations that are ethically problematic is discussed.     

Social Capital and Internet Use: The Irrelevant,the Bad,and the Good

The social effects of Internet use have been a major concern for social scientists and society alike. How the Internet affects social capital has been a hot topic in sociology and other social sciences: Is the Internet reinforcing and complementing social capital? Or is it isolating people and diminishing their social capital? Social capital is here defined as the resources that are embedded in one's social ties. This article reviews the literature on the subject, looking at three perspectives: one that suggests no relationship between the Internet and social capital, a second that suggests a negative relationship between the Internet and social capital, and a third that suggests a positive relationship between the Internet and social capital. I conclude by showing that despite the prominent dystopian view of the Internet in the public and in some academic discourse (and the moral panic associated with it), research supports a positive relationship between Internet use and social capital. In addition, I discuss new trends and directions for future research.     

‚The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly‘

According to the most influential contribution of recent years to the comparative study of advanced welfare states, Esping-Andersen’s ’Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism‘, the welfare state basically comes in three variants: as a social-democratic, a conservative, or as a liberal regime. Yet, at a closer look, in particular the ’conservative‘ regime-type represents a highly problematic category. The article claims that the major problems of Esping-Andersen’s typology and theory originate from his sole focus on the class conflict and his neglect of the religious cleavage. Major theoretical contradictions and empirical puzzles of his approach can be solved if we take not only the impact of the catholic social doctrine on the development of the welfare state into account, but consider also the influence of social protestantism, especially that of protestant dissent and of protestant non-conformism. The paper substantiates this claim with data for the early formative period of the welfare state (1890–1920) as well as for the high-time of the welfare state from the 1960s to the 1990s.     

The Good,the Bad,and the Ugly: Perceptions of Public Relations Practitioners

This study contributes to relationship management research by introducing a new construct—authenticity—as the mediating variable between symmetrical communication and relationship quality, and investigating the behavioral outcomes of perceived organization–public relationship quality. We propose a structural model of symmetrical communication, authentic organizational behavior, organization–public relationships, and two behavioral outcomes—positive and negative messaging. The results support all the hypothesized linkages, and shed new light on the process of relationship management.     

Good for the Goose,Bad for the Gander: International Labor Standards and Comparative Development

The international labor rights movement, led by the International Labour Organization (ILO), asserts that developing countries are currently ready for more stringent labor standards. We investigate this claim by examining the timing of labor standard adoption in highly developed countries, which were all once as poor as today’s developing countries and made the trade-off between labor standards and income in the past. Their experience therefore suggests a safe income threshold for adopting similar labor standards in the developing world. We find that every ILO-proposed labor standard is highly premature for the developing countries of Sub-Saharan Africa. Countries there are between 100 and 300 years from reaching this threshold. Similarly, we find that so-called sweatshop-intensive developing countries are between 35 and 100 years from this threshold. ILO-proposed policy is exactly backward. A substantial relaxation of labor standards is the appropriate labor policy for the developing world.

The Good,the Bad,and the Ugly: Dimensions of Success and Failure in Research Collaboration

Failure is a common experience in society, and analyses of failure have been important for developing social theory. This article analyzes how chemical scientists experience failure in both credited and uncredited research collaborations. Credited work produces the outputs that are evaluated by administrators and analyzed by social scientists. Thus, “credit” is closely tied with visibility in science. But chemical scientists often engage in uncredited collaboration as well. Uncredited collaborations are not opportunities to receive formal credit for one’s work, but chemical scientists still engage in uncredited work in order to meet the metrics by which they are evaluated. Analyzing 106 interviews with chemical scientists, this article builds a framework for understanding success in collaboration. The two dimensions of this framework that shape experience of success and failure are (1) whether a collaboration produced outputs and (2) whether expectations are met. Collaborative expectations often go unmet, but these disappointments rarely undermine collaborations from producing credited outputs. Novice scientists often have positive experiences in uncredited collaboration despite not receiving credit for their work. Success and failure are experienced differently in credited and uncredited collaboration. Institutional pressures often create circumstances for failure in collaborations while also keeping scientists invested in unsuccessful collaborations.     

The Good,the Bad and the Unhappy: The Cultural Meanings of Newspaper Reporting on Jackpot Winners

Accounts of jackpot winners and big gambling wins are common in Swedish newspapers. Analysis of over 2000 such newspaper articles reveals that their content is structured according to specific themes and cultural topics. Four such topics are identified: wealth as a test of morals and character, the social impact of wealth, the just and good world, and luck and the occult. Culturally structured narratives like these—which elaborate on mythological and moralistic schemes of good and evil, rewards and punishments, and which concern questions of human nature and social values—have a long history in folk tradition and in Christian moral teachings. Jackpot wins provide a discursive realm for moral and existential questions that, to some extent, fills a void left by the decline of traditional folklore and formal religion. Apparently, this discourse stimulates interest in games and constitutes one of the cultural roots of contemporary gambling.     

The Good, the Bad, and the Regulator: An Experimental Test of Two Conditional Audit Schemes

Conditional audit rules are designed to achieve regulatory compliance with fewer inspections than required by random auditing. A regulator places individuals into audit pools that differ in probability of audit or severity of fine and specifies transition rules between pools. Future pool assignment is conditional on current audit results. We conduct an experiment to compare two specific schemes—Harrington's Past-Compliance Targeting and Friesen's Optimal Targeting—against random auditing. We find a production possibility frontier between compliance and minimizing inspections. Optimal targeting generates the lowest inspection rates as predicted, but random auditing the highest compliance. Past-compliance targeting is intermediate.     

Going Bad and Staying Bad: Crystallizing Dramatic Self Change

Symbolic interactionists recognize how selves transform for better or worse. When transforming for worse, or going bad, selves often stay bad, owing to societal response. In this article, we examine fictional characters from popular media (specifically, Michael Corleone from The Godfather trilogy and Walter White from Breaking Bad) and a nonfictional athlete (Lance Armstrong) to discuss staying bad as self‐conscious choices made by those who go bad. Using Athens' depiction of self transformation and adding the notion of particular trajectories (teleological, immersed, and ideational), we compare and contrast the characters' transformations from noble, or potentially heroic, to unapologetically blemished. Our analogic connection depict patterns of development that stress the fundamental importance of agency in regard to processes of staying bad, even when such agency appears self‐destructive.     

The Breast and the State: An Analysis of Good and Bad Nipples by Gender,Race, and Class

A reflective, and adoring, commentary on Jessica Van Denend's Kleinian analysis of how society views women who have been incarcerated in prison. Drawing on Klein, feminist theory, and critical race theory, this article interrogates the projections of good and bad breast onto women, particularly women of color, during times of neoliberal shrinkage of state responsibility for human needs.     

Being a Lesbian and Being in Love:

Clinicians and laypeople alike have assumed that lesbian identity is a unitary phenomenon, a central component of which included involved in a romantic or sexual relationship with another women. This paper is an empirical examination of the ways in which lesbian women construct their identities and the role of relationships in lesbian identity construction. Based on a sample of 94 lesbian and bisexual women, three identity accounts, or the meanings that women attach to their lesbian identity, are described. The first emphasized the public, political meanings of lesbian identity; the second emphasized the importance of social and romantic relationships with other women; and the third emphasized bisexuality and relationships with men. A Final section discusses practical implications of the diversity of lesbian identities.