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TO BE INVITED TO GIVE A Glover Lecture for a second time is an honour which is difficult to decline. It also seemed an impossible challenge considering Edward Glover's2 contributions to the study of sexual deviations covering a period of 40 years. After some hesitation, I found the stimulus for this presentation in something Glover said in his paper on "Aggression and Sadomasochism" which he gave at a symposium organised by the Portman Clinic in 1963: "it will be maintained that one of the important functions of sexual perversions is defensive in nature, a kind of organised sexual adaptation which, however, may in many instances bring a variety of ego-disorders in its train." He added: "the pervert protects his reality sense from gross interference." (Glover, 1964).
Those words had been in mind for a great many years but now with my own added experience, I asked myself the question: Is that the reason why perverts are so difficult to treat? In the case of a fetishist, for instance, the psychic reality which he protects is that there are no sexual differences, a wholly illusory belief, shared by the man or woman who dresses or acts as a person of the opposite sex. Is it possible that by protecting their distorted reality sense perverts succeed in protecting some hard core of ego disturbance, which threatens the whole of their being? It seemed that perhaps this could be a better line of understanding the therapeutic challenge we constantly face in this field, rather than the popular misconception that a perversion is not given up because it is pleasurable. On the contrary, we know the misery of the perverts' lives as they go in search of their ephermeral satisfactions.