On the Use of “Sexual Addiction”: The case for “Perversion”*

COMPULSIVE SEXUALITY seems to have become a more frequent phenomenon in clinical practices as well as in the general culture, reflected in magazine and newspaper articles, the popular currency of the term “sexual addiction,” and in targeted twelve-step programs. There appears to be one of those confluences of the social and the clinical that are fascinating, one that was clearly emerging even before the Monica Lewinsky-Bill Clinton controversy burst onto the public stage. It seems to me that, as often is the case, old wine has appeared in new bottles. People I understood as showing essentially perverse structures of desire, and as driven in their sexual appetites (sometimes very driven, sometimes less than was claimed) have been calling themselves and diagnosed as “sexual addicts.” Addiction seems to have become—like trauma in recent years—an increasingly popular explanation for troubling goings on.

The thought that joins addiction and trauma may not be entirely random. Both terms locate cause and power outside oneself; a certain passivity and victim status accrues to the afflicted person. The word “addiction,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary, originally meant “a formal giving over or delivery by sentence of court,” from which it came to mean “a surrender, or dedication of any one to a master.” Thus, “addict” is by definition passive; “assigned, made over, bound” are its earliest synonyms. Compare “perversion,” the root meaning of which is “thoroughly turned”—turned from the good, obviously, as its synonyms are “corrupt, incorrect, improper.” Perversion is more active, and the ominous elements are in the person, not in some external master.

To suggest that sexual addiction may be seen as perversion is not to say that there is no addiction involved, any more than to wonder about the appeal of trauma as an explanation would be to deny that traumas occur. From a psychoanalytic perspective, addiction can be understood