A sexual violation in an analytic treatment and its personal and theoretical aftermath

46 

MURIEL DIMEN, Ph.D.

argues that the analyst and the patient always do what they are talking 

about: “every verbal exchange [ . . . ] every interpretation, consists of a 

piece of behavior with the patient and then a commentary, in speech, on 

that behavior. The commentary, the content of the interpretation is [ . . . ] 

the metamessage.” Clinical theory then directs the clinician to decode 

this recursiveness—transference and countertransference—into voice, 

with the patient, this pattern that, first informally established in the family 

kitchen, repeats in the different lexicon of the consulting room.

Recursion suggests, in a funny way, that silence, or at least what is 

unspoken, is inevitable and even vital to the talking cure (Stern, 1997). 

On the one hand, the important thing about free association (if there re-

ally is such a phenomenon) is when it stops—when silence breaks the 

flow, and the repressed or dissociated signals its presence. On the other 

hand, sometimes we do what we say before we can say what we do, 

because, in some cases, we cannot know what we have to say until we 

materialize it by enacting it. Then, according to current enactment theory 

(see Leary, 1994, for a review), our raw material comes alive before our 

eyes in a tangible drama. In the analyst’s and analysand’s collective 

hands, enactment becomes fodder for conversation, from which they 

create the liberating analysis. Then again, sometimes silence is merely 

about private space, the clinician’s or the patient’s, and as such ought to 

be left alone (Winnicott, 1971; Khan, 1974).

The silences between me and Dr. O, however, constituted one big re-

cursion. In other words, silence that reflects anxiety (i.e., not talking 

about an enactment) can itself be an enactment. One thing you could say 

about the me who came to see him: I did not speak very much, which is 

probably a surprise to those who know me now. The habit of wordless-

ness, as I learned from my second analysis, was not exactly innate. Or if 

I tended toward silence, I also made it a way to survive. Many years ago, 

friends would experience my quietude as withholding, even hostile. 

Maybe the sound of inhibition inverts the unconscious attack, but I was 

aware mainly of the fear of sounding stupid. Shame was my constant 

companion. Now, casting my eye back, I see that quieting myself—dis-

sociating what I saw and felt and knew—helped me manage my internal 

life. I was making a strenuous effort to wrangle emotions, passions, and 

thoughts that felt too noisy in my family and the world.

Family rules authorized loudness for my father and brother, while my 

mother tiptoed around, whispering the words “Sotto voce,” and I was 

what they called “quiet.” Which I knew wasn’t a good thing, even if 

 

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SEXUAL VIOLATION  IN AN ANALYTIC TREATMENT 

47

my mother, leaning on Italian (which no one spoke, but which per- 

haps seemed refined, not coarse like her parents and husband), urged 

everyone to hush. The failures subtended by quietness—tantamount to 

being good—heightened my sense of a core defect. My silent manner 

stumped my parents. That I knew, with the same dissociation with which 

I knew they settled for it in the face of more obtrusive troubles—my fa-

ther’s brittle narcissism, my mother’s depression, and my brother’s near-

delinquency. Anyway, the social worker to whom my mother took us for 

family therapy said, “She’s okay, leave her alone.” My brother was the 

identified patient, while my father’s fearful and selfish, if gender-normal, 

refusal to attend sessions, ruined my mother’s brave intervention.

Within the blankness that lulled my teeming mind and was also meant 

to calm my storming family, I was lonely (as, I now think, I was with Dr. 

O, though neither of us realized it). Unfortunately, under the indirect rule 

of sotto voce, any expression of distress would come across as, and some-

times indeed was, merely obstreperous. My own expressiveness would, 

in turn, further reduce both my mother’s self-esteem and my own; my 

failure to validate her inflamed my shame. Only my father had the privi-

lege of apparently shame-free, wordless self-expression—the smack 

here, the shake there, the storming out the door for the rest of the day. 

His brutality, mantled by silence, was unveiled only when I began peek-

ing: my second analyst’s hunch caused me to query extant kinfolk (my 

father’s death followed my mother’s by nine years) about family vio-

lence. When I was 18 months old, said a cousin 20 years older than I, she 

overheard her mother speaking to my mother, who was worrying that 

my father was being “too rough” with me. Did “rough,” I asked, mean 

hitting or shaking? “Oh, not hitting, I think, just shaking,” replied my 

cousin.

Three points to note: my father was shaking me; my mother may or 

may not have been stopping him, or trying to; and she wasn’t sure any-

thing was wrong. Of course, a third-hand report about an event from 

over a half-century ago needs many grains of salt. That my father also 

brutalized my brother (who attests to this) proves his capacity for vio-

lence, which I must have witnessed. Surely both culture and character 

were active here. In my parents’ immigrant families of origin, beatings 

and verbal abuse were routine, a legacy of cultures where corporal pun-

ishment was standard and immigration brought economic hardship as 

well as political and cultural safety. That my father seemed to have no 

hesitation about physical abuse and that my mother appeared to ques-

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