Introduction

Psychoanalysis as a body of knowledge has always encompassed contested areas; some of these concepts and ideas are deemed controversial yet remain within our lexicon, while others are discarded or become taboo. The topic (or even the word) perversion is one such vexed subject—pathologizing in tone and connotation, with outdated referents that arouse enormous anxiety and even hostility.

This is not without reason or merit. Historically, the term has been used in ways that have harmed certain subgroups (homosexuals being the most flagrantly harmed group) to very real exclusionary and damaging effects. Despite a complete reversal in recent years, the damage (and guilt) remains palpable and the mere utterance of the word perversion can rankle and alienate. Hence, for some psychoanalytic practitioners, the term has become forbidden territory, and those who dare to even think it are judged immoral, while others make use of it, but often without being explicit about its parameters.

At least aspirationally, we are not an industry that traffics in moralism and judgmentalism. We judge (as part of thinking) but do not pre-judge, and we do not value judgmentalism—that being a proclivity to view others absent compassion, empathy, and understanding. We aspire to openness and free communication of even hateful feelings and thoughts. Our unconscious houses the full range of human potentiality, for good or ill. Doesn't free association promote the expression of destructive forces that live in our psyche so that the naming of such can lead to greater understanding? In this vein, does naming have to be pathologizing in such a way that harms rather than facilitates understanding? The relevance of these questions varies around

the psychoanalytic world. Some analysts use the term perversion freely, while others, especially in North America, revile it.

Perhaps it would be helpful to begin by defining basic psychoanalytic ideals and goals that surround and embed—indeed, are def