Interview with Adrienne Harris on Perversion is Us? Eight Notes, by Muriel Dimen

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• Interview with Adrienne Harris on Perversion is Us?Eight Notes, by Muriel Dimen
• Adrienne Harris (bio) and Andrea Celenza (bio)

Andrea Celenza (AC):

Welcome Adrienne, I am so grateful and honored that you are able to do this interview. I know that you need absolutely no introduction, but I'm going to go through a formal introduction and then, in a less formal way, I'm going to introduce you and your work.

Adrienne Harris, PhD, is on the faculty and is Supervisor of the NYU [New York University] Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, also known as the NYU Postdoc. And she is on the faculty and is Supervisor of the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California, also known as PINC. You are an adjunct professor at The New School for Social Research where you teach a seminar in clinical psychoanalysis (and the students are very lucky to have you). Also through The New School, you co-founded the Sándor Ferenczi Center.

Adrienne Harris (AH):

And also I just want to say that I did that with Lew Aron and Jeremy Safran. Having lost both of them in this last decade is very painful.

AC:

Yes, we've lost a lot of great colleagues and friends … Muriel included.

AH:

Which is why I am so glad to be doing this with you today.

AC:

It's a great way to honor and remember her.

Back to you, you are also an Editor of Psychoanalytic Dialogues, Studies in Gender and Sexuality, and an Editor of the Relational Perspectives book series, put out by Routledge. You have written numerous articles on various subjects of contemporary psychoanalysis and you are among the generation that founded [End Page 791] relational psychoanalysis, a very important—and I think we can all agree—paradigm shift in psychoanalysis.

In a less formal way, you were one of Muriel Dimen's best friends, who we are honoring today by discussing her seminal paper on perversion: "Perversion is Us?: Eight Notes," which she published in 2001 in Psychoanalytic Dialogues. Though this was over 20 years ago, it is a paper that is very relevant today.

We are going to go through each one of the notes, I will extract an excerpt—a sentence or two—from each that caused me to pose a question to you, Adrienne, to see where you might stand today, where Muriel might stand, perhaps what Muriel would say, and more than anything, I'm interested in what you would say in relation to today's psychoanalysis, in terms of how we view the concept of perversion, how it is used clinically (or not) and how it is objected to, especially in the United States.

So, without further ado, let's go to the first note.

Note 1. How to Talk About This: Anxiety and Disgust

AC:

Muriel makes the point that perversion is culture-bound; its status as an illness falls apart in the context of multiplicity, standards of morality, and power structures. She gives many examples, such as cutting, bloodletting, Chasseguet-Smirgel's anal universe, Khan's rendition of foreskin fetishism … And then she says, "Perversion may be defined, after all, as the sex that you like and I don't" (p. 827). And in that way, she really puts a subjective angle on it. My question to you, Adrienne, is: What if we consider perversion in a different way, instead of thinking about it as a behavior, but as a quality of relating?

AH:

First of all, Andrea, thank you for organizing this. It is very meaningful to me because Muriel and I were very close and I know that, as she got ill and was dying, she felt an enormous sense of not having been recognized. Some part of her dying was a very despairing experience of not mattering or not mattering enough. And so, I find this, for me, an important reparative effort to look at this work she was doing on perversions and to think about its viability and its importance. [End Page 792]

AC:

If I can interject for a moment, … I did not know she felt that way. Now I feel even more committed to doing...