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.     

Muriel Dimen,Field Theorist

ABSTRACT

This paper celebrates Muriel Dimen’s unique manner of conceptualizing the field with regard to the recursive relations she theorized among psychic and social components of sexual subjectivity. Recursion is a structural force in the field that implicates the analyst in the history of fieldwork.     

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.     

Muriel Dimen Interviewed by Andrew Samuels in the Context of the Publication of Her Book Sexuality,Intimacy, Power

Samuels interviewed Dimen in lieu of a book review for her Sexuality, Intimacy, Power. The interview was unstructured and dialogical and covered the following main topics: (a) professional issues in the field of psychoanalysis such as the relation of theory to practice and reflections on the nature and content of trainings in psychoanalysis; (b) issues in the broad areas of sexuality and gender including the question of moral relativism with respect to sexual behaviors historically designated as “perverse” and considerations of masculinity, femininity, and patriarchy; (c) intellectual considerations such as the relations between anthropology and psychoanalysis and the as yet indeterminate nature of the discipline of psychoanalysis, neither art nor science and not a hybrid of the two; and (d) the political, social, and cultural contexts within which psychoanalytic endeavors including the interview itself are taking place.     

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.     

On Being Bad and Good: My Brilliant Friend Muriel Dimen

ABSTRACT

This essay focuses on Muriel Dimen’s work on ambivalence as an important factor in female identity formation through a parallel with Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend novels.     

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.     

Reading Some Fragments From the Work of Muriel Dimen,or Contradictions on the Spicy Side

ABSTRACT

My piece is concerned with some of Muriel Dimen’s feminist writing of the 1980s and her bold and unyielding pleasure in elaborating a sexual politics rooted in an acceptance of the proliferation of sexual diversities and the ambivalent relations of feelings and theories that so marked the moment. Between subjective narrative, social theory and psychoanalysis Muriel found a new kind of space for a feminist enunciation that could be undertaken while wearing extravagantly lascivious red lizard skin shoes.     

Between the Ethos of Science and the Ethos of Ideology

Abstract

This paper attempts to explain the continuous friction between Marxist sociology and Marxist ideology in terms of the premises of the theory of scientific communism, which accords to proletarian ideology the status of scientific truth. The successive stages of the evolution of Soviet sociology are related to the parallel development of views on the scientific ethos. The notion of the “ethos of ideology” is introduced and applied to the analysis of the ideological turmoil Soviet sociology underwent in the course of its establishment as an academic discipline. “Value tolerance” is advocated as an alternative to the “value-partisan” and “value-neutral” orientations in social science.     

Luo Xiuhua and Her Family

MANY women set a goal for themselves of devoting themselves entirely to their husbands and children, but at the same time, they want to be successful in their work as well. This is certainly hard to realize. But Luo Xiuhua, a Tujia ethnic woman from Hunan Province, has turned this ideal into reality. Luo Xiuhua was born in Dayong County of Zhangjiajie City, Hunan Province. After graduating from a normal school in 1963, she taught in a village, and     

Wu Haiyan and Her Fashion

Forty-year-old Wu Haiyan is afamous designer in China today.Sheis an associate professor in theChinese Academy of Fine Arts and also thechief designer of Hangzhou Kaidi SilkCompany Ltd.At the beginning of 1998,the     

Wu Yanyan and Her Coach

WU Yanyan was chasing me too hard, said Liaoning swimmer Chen Yan when asked to explain how she broke the 18-year-old world record at China's most recent national sports meeting--the Eighth National Games. In other words, she credits her fellow competitor for propelling her to such a prominent Victory. Wu Yanyan is one of the brightest new stars in China's swimming world. One of the reasons is her coach, Wu Jicai. Unlike most coaches, who adopt strict strategies with their athletes, Wu Jicai has always been accommodating with Wu Yanyan. She was only nine years old     

Gao Fenglian and Her Papercuts

The papercuts of Gao Fenglian, a northern Shanxi woman, are collected by Chinese and foreign galleries, museums and individuals. For a time, it has been a hot topic in her hometown. When she returned from the UN Fourth World Conference on Women, the rural woman who has lived on the Loess Plateau for dozens of years was admired by her fellow villagers. The scissors gave the hardworking woman infinite delight     

Time,Space, and Memories

ABSTRACT

This article traces the ways that gendered and generational family practices were remembered across time in the context of working-class homes in Victorian Britain. Two everyday domestic objects—the father's chair and the grandfather clock—are examined and analyzed, drawing on John Gillis' work on ritualized family spaces and contested notions of time (Gillis 1996). Both these objects resonate with the contested use of domestic space and the layered meanings of family time in working-class lives, not least because both are often remembered in autobiographical accounts of home and family. The special place of the father's chair highlighted the feminizing of the home and accompanying development of rituals to welcome and ensconce the father in his domestic domain each day. The sound of clocks underpinned the bringing together of industrial time, separating leisure and work for those at school or employment away from home, and at the same time conveying the cyclical nature of family life and its everyday routines from day to day, year to year, and generation to generation. Memories of chairs and clocks embedded in autobiographies offer important evidence about the images, sounds, and sensory experiences that resonated most powerfully when remembering and composing the hierarchies and tensions of working-class family life.     

Transnational Families: Memories and Narratives

This introduction to a special issue of the journal explores not only the role of memory and narratives in understanding gender and transnational families, but suggests how such families use and understand their memories to construct coherent narratives of the self and kin. In common with renewed thinking about the multifaceted nature of migration, the complexities of the process, and the continuing dialogue that migration establishes between the old and the new, the past and the present, those who engage with oral history/life story methods are increasingly aware that such data provide a ‘value added’ to rich empirical detail. These methods reveal the use of memory and its role in the continuing emotional adjustments in which most transnational experience is embroiled. They show how the multi‐layering of memory, language and narratives are indicators of the ways in which culture shapes recall and recounting. Families themselves become sites of belonging, part of the imaginary unity through which a transnational family may seek its identity. Equally, oral histories can tease out ways in which gender differences impact on, or are impacted by, transnational lives. The introduction situates the subsequent articles within a brief overview of oral history and migration.     

'Exchange is Creation': The Revolutionary Poetics of Muriel Rukeyser and Hugh MacDiarmid

Abstract

The increased cultural authority of science in the early decades of the twentieth century called into question prior cultural assumptions regarding the status of poetry as an important discipline. The debate about the changed nature of the relations between the arts and sciences assumed particular importance for the literary left, as writers, critics and intellectuals debated the role which culture would play in political revolution. In order to broaden our understanding of the left's engagement with the problem of the relationship between the arts and sciences, this article will compare the work of the leftist American poet Muriel Rukeyser with that of the Scottish nationalist and Communist poet Hugh MacDiarmid. In particular, I will explore the ways in which their understanding of the essential similarities between the arts and sciences informed their conception of the relationship between poetics and political praxis.     

鲍侃和她的四世同堂(英文)

"丢,丢,丢手绢,轻轻地放在小朋友的后边,大家不要告诉他,快点儿快点儿抓住他,快点儿快点儿抓住他……"这是一首传唱了几代人的儿歌,它陪伴我们度过了一个个美好而快乐的童年……在北京东城区灯市口社区的一栋老式住宅楼里有一位老人,她是原延安保育院幼儿教师、现已93岁高龄的全国妇联离休干部鲍侃;她将自己的一生献给了天真烂漫的孩子们,也正为此,她写就了这首经久不衰的儿歌——《丢手绢》。老人家如今已是儿孙满堂,尽享天伦之乐。虽然双目失明多年,但她的世界依然绚丽多彩!