Pleasure Acts Upon Us: Discussion of Commentaries by Dean and González

In discussing these generous and generative commentaries, I note points of agreement and divergence with an eye toward clarifying my positions on perversity. As such, I explore the implications of my interlocutors’ formidably concise articulations (González: perversion permits “the materialization of intergenerational too-muchness” [this issue, p. 282] and Dean: psychoanalysis is like “getting royally fucked by a dubious stranger” [this issue, p. 274]). Productively pressed by their queries, I refine the difference between sexuality and perversion and, drawing on Deleuze (1971), I flesh out important distinctions between sadism and the masochistic contract.     

Fairy Tales Gone Mad: Symposium on Nathalie Djurberg's It's the Mother

This symposium engages with the work of claymation artist Nathalie Djurberg. Djurberg molds and animates plasticine figures with as much precision and skill as she masterfully puppeteers her viewer's affective responses through a blizzard of violence, cruelty, and self/other boundary intrusions. Briefly commenting on some of the questions she proposes we concern ourselves with in her piece It's the Mother, I introduce 4 short commentaries that examine it from the perspective of maternality and its discourses, womanhood and its institutional abuses, internal objects that constitute our worlds with and/or against our consent, and the implications for psychoanalytic practice when a treatment traffics in the relational currency of sadism and masochism.     

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.