Working with Sexuality: Bodies, Desires and Imagination

Don’t Tell Anyone – Ghosts That Haunt: Sexual Boundary Violations in Our Communities’

Sexual boundary violations-and their perpetrators-are ghosts that haunt us within (and of course outside) the psychoanalytic world. Reverberating well beyond the particular analytic dyad within which they occur, these violations invade nearly every professional community. Sexual boundary violations cast a long shadow over us; they generate horror, anxiety, curiosity, and sometimes excitement. Our need to deny what we know and to protect exalted mentors from scrutiny has led to a toxic collective silence; by and large, we have remained publicly mute while engaging in plenty of private gossip. Anxiety about the destructive consequences of “telling” further complicates our experience and can result in disavowal-a near total foreclosure of the reality of the breach along with our experience of it. In this paper, Joyce queries the dynamics driving our complex responses to sexual boundary violations and explore their collision with our professional ideal, using a personal experience to illustrate some of these issues.