Perversion: A Lacanian Psychoanalytic Approach to the Subject by Stephanie S. Swales New York:  Routledge, 2012,  264 pp.

The author is one of the increasing number of younger, originally English-speaking practitioners or academics, educated in North America, who were supervised in their graduate studies, in depth and in detail, by Bruce Fink. He is a leading North American translator of Lacan into English,

a writer of important theoretical and clinical chapters and books, explicating and exploring the implications of Lacan's work, and a lively, valued participant in the group of late-Lacan and now postLacan students. Most of these supervisees, including Swales, have had some or substantial clinical experience, in a variety of settings in the United States. They write in a style that is similar to Fink's and is very familiar to North Americans: clear, organized, straightforward, with the context clearly set and almost all of the thinking steps filled in. They also tend to have the virtue of being humble in their writing, careful about defining and explaining the terms they use, provisional in their claims, clearly open to more input, and enthusiastic and/or detailed in a way demonstrated by people who have come across Lacan and found him compatible with something in themselves. From an English-speaking reader's point of view, these young writers are reader-friendly and inspiring.

Using Lacan's structural distinctions to separate out his diagnostic groupings of neurosis, perverse, and psychosis, Swales is very specific about the diagnostic and etiological distinctions between those persons who are perverse and those who do the same illegal, non-consensual acts out of a neurotic structure. Having studied the literature and treated both kinds of patients for up to a year in a forensic out-patient setting, she is also specific about the differences in the treatment approaches—useful or not—in each type of individual. Further, her descriptions and discussions make an important overall contribution to the practice of psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy influenced by the Lacanian