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The study of perversion may be replacing that of narcissism as the hottest new area in which investigation of a clinical entity leads to broad theoretical speculations. Chasseguet-Smirgel's contribution to this burgeoning field explores perversion as an entity in itself, but its more ambitious intent is to place the perverse impulse in a universal dimension. The author alerts us to the ambitiousness of her project when she suggests, in her opening paragraph, that for man "… perversion is one of the essential ways and means he applies in order to push forward the frontiers of what is possible and to unsettle reality" (p. 1).
Her study is brilliant—one might even call it an intellectual tour de force. Yet, paradoxically, while her large vision is stimulating and original, it is in her actual study of perversion that she falls a bit short of the mark, in my opinion retreating from some hard-won insights into perversion. Although her two expositions—that of clinical perversion and of the meaning of perversion within the larger scheme of things—are theoretically intertwined, for purposes of this review, I shall attempt to disentangle them and treat each separately.
While Freud emphasized the perception of the anatomic difference between the sexes as critical to development, Chasseguet-Smirgel sees the essential human tragedy as emanating from a double difference: the anatomic difference between the sexes and the age difference between the generations. Her central thesis is that "the Oedipal tragedy arises largely from the chronological time-lag that exists between the emergence of the boy's desire for his mother and the attainment of his full genital capacity. This time-lag is the result of a kind of a prematurity in the human being… It could even be at the root of the universal taboo of incest, where that which is forbidden is substituted for infantile impotence" (p. 2). While perversion has sometimes been interpreted as the boy's attempt to deny the sexual diffe