With Culture in Mind

Muriel Dimen, PhD, is Adjunct Clinical Professor of Psychology, New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, and Professor Emerita, Anthropology, Lehman College (CUNY). On the faculties of many institutes, she is Editor of Studies in Gender and Sexuality, associate editor of Psychoanalytic Dialogues, and a founding board member and former Treasurer of the International Association for Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy. Her most recent book, Sexuality, Intimacy, Power, received the Goethe Award from the Canadian Psychological Association for the Best Book of Psychoanalytic Scholarship published in 2003. She has also written Surviving Sexual Contradictions (1986) and The Anthropological Imagination (1977). Her co-edited books are Gender in Psychoanalytic Space: Between Clinic and Culture with Virginia Goldner (2002), Storms in Her Head: New Clinical and Theoretical Perspectives on Breuer and Freud’s Studies on Hysteria with Adrienne Harris (2001), and Regional Variation in Modern Greece and Cyprus: Toward an Ethnography of Greece with Ernestine Friedl (1976). A Fellow at the New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU, she practices in Manhattan and supervises nationally.

"This volume breaks new ground. It introduces six brilliant young psychoanalytic writers, who have grown up with both psychoanalysis and critical social theory 'in their bones.' From this perspective, they are able to take up the longstanding problem of integrating a social perspective into psychoanalytic clinical work at the most fundamental level: they organize their treatments around the core concepts of the critical social theories of Foucault, Althusser, Butler, and others who map the ways that culture expropriates individuals, integrating them with contemporary intersubjectivist analysis. Further, they reveal themselves in the same complex psychosocial fields, with a full view of how they too, as analysts, are implicated in the very same processes. Thus, the social dimensions of their analyses are not tacked on, but essential, and the vivid possibilities of this radical reorientation are not only suggested, but often realized. This is a rare achievement." - Stephen Seligman, Infant-Parent Program, UCSF, California, USA"This is an extraordinary collection. In just a few pages of clinical case material, each author remarkably manages to shatter any illusions one might hold that the psychic and the social are separable. The writing is powerful and each vignette movingly explores the complex psychosocial interdependence of patient and therapist. Seamlessly blending high theory with experience-near clinical encounters, this book is a major contribution to a non-normative psychoanalysis." - Lynne Layton, Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society

• Dimen, Introduction. Part I: The Social Third.Sheehy, Melissa: Lost in a Fog, or "How Difficult is This MOMMY Stuff, Anyway?" Hartman, Darren and Stephen: Erotic Interludes in Political Transference. Lobban, Li-An: Wounded by War. Pugachevsky, Mariana: An MS Patient in My Office. Rozmarin, Dori: "O Thou Seer, Go, Flee Thee." Guralnik, Ede: Race, the Law, and I. Benjamin, Facing Reality Together: Discussion of "The Social Third." Part II: Interpellations.Guralnik, Raven: Travels in Reality. Hartman, Darren with Dominic: From the Social to the Psychic. Lobban, Glenys: White or Not. Rozmarin, David and Jonathan: The Hostility of Discourse. Pugachevsky, Amy: The Intersection of Body and History. Sheehy, Anonymous: Floaters. Orbach, Bringing History to Mind: Discussion of "Interpellations." Part III: Subjective Experience, Collective Narratives.Guralnik, Interpellating Grace. Hartman, Darren then Harvey: The Incest Taboo Reconsidered: The Collective Unconscious Reprised. Rozmarin, Asaf: I Am Yourself. Saketopoulou, DeShawn: Beyond the Color-blindness in Gender. Pugachevsky, Lynn, Ben, Lucy: Forbidden to Be. Lobban, Martha: Resignification Road. Samuels, Letters to the Authors: Discussion of "Subjective Experience, Collective Narratives."