This article focuses on the notion of perversion in early sexual life, coined by Freud as a polymorphous perversity, in offering a rereading of the three prefaces to Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. From there I comment on Lacan's study of Sade in order to highlight the tragic melancholia that underlies perversion, using sexual drives to compensate for the lack and the loss of objectal satisfaction. The study of the psychosexual dynamic of perversion leads us to the key role of sublimation as the reverse of perversion. This review of the notion of perversion, as an agieren out of depression and out of the lack of satisfactory sublimation, thus provides a conceptual frame to reflect on the paradoxes of the contemporary sexual landscape, sexually liberated but diseroticized.