You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Perversion, like beauty, is in the eyes of the beholder.
McDougall, 1995.
This courageous and original book brings to the fore aspects of contemporary culture and its impact on human sexuality and gender dynamics. Knafo and Lo Bosco far from exploring perversions under a moralizing umbrella, assume a curious and respectful stand in attempting to conceptualize the crossing of virtuality and physicality. The authors assert “we wish to be clear at the outset that our position on perversion is not one that is categorically pejorative or morally judgmental, or one that perpetuates ‘an us versus them’ mentality …” (p. 7). They make a clear recommendation to retain the term perversion because of the “malignant and destructive element on the far side of the perversion spectrum” (p. 25).
This well-organized book manages to sustain a neutral position while attempting to elucidate how technology is shaping human desire in unforeseen ways. The Age of Perversion invites the reader to engage in a comprehensive dialogue between psychoanalysis and other disciplines. Part 1 is devoted to theoretical positions. These are accompanied by vivid and compelling clinical cases. Part 2 centers on the widening scope of perversions in existential and techno-social domains. The Age of Perversion highlights the fact that technology has become intrinsically linked to our bodies. This is so much the case in contemporary culture that one may affirm that the body is not just a body but a techno-body. Indeed, technological advances and cyber-communication expand our biological body. I-pad, monitor, I-phone become then extensions of the self.
Early in the history of psychoanalysis analysts paid attention to how machines entered the internal world of patients who were suffering from severe psychopathology. Victor Tausk (1933), a contemporary of Freud, wrote a seminal paper under the title “On the Origins of the ‘Influencing Machine’ in Schizophrenia.” Tausk attempted to elucidate the meaning of delusional