The perversion of ethics

Freud Opens His Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality with a chapter dedicated to sexual aberrations. In this and other papers, he presents possible deviations, sexual objects and sexual objectives to show that sexuality, although anchored in the biological, is also a cultural acquisition. Since then, psychoanalysis has been concerned with psychosexuality.

The statement that the sexual object is not given, but built up in the field of intersubjectivity, if taken to its ultimate consequences, still creates an impact today, because we are led to recognize that it is not only the sexual deviant who constructs the object of his or her desire: all of us do so. In fact, if sexual is defined as deviation, as a perversion in relation to the biological, then we are all deviants. Each one of us creates his or her own world. For example, it is not hard to observe that the world in which the phobic moves is very different from that of the obsessive. They are different realities. In this sense, the object of the drive will always and necessarily be unique to each in the function of the specificity of his or her desire.

The most important teaching from the study of perversion, then, is that reality is built up by desire in all cases, and not only in perversion.

The theme has been explored in this double perspective. The study of the unconscious of perversion, that is, of its metapsychology, cannot be dissociated from the type of reality that is produced by this unconscious. This is because the disavowal of castration is a psychic mechanism that touches on an outside reality - the cultural order - and not on the reality of the subject's fantasy life. The cultural order is built upon the prohibition against incest, through the threat of castration, that is, through law, and is a sphere disavowed by perversion.

However, of the various realities that perversion can produce, neosexuality (Chasseguet-Smirgel 1991: 18) was the star