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It is a rare pleasure to review a book by an esteemed colleague and friend with whom I have corresponded and shared projects. Dr. Benvenuto, among his many accomplishments and publications, is the founder and editor of the European Journal of Psychoanalysis, where my work on the famous Schreber case was published (Lothane, 2010 [2012]).
In this book, a wide-ranging essay on perversions as subversions, Dr. Benvenuto offers us a fascinating and thought-provoking clinical, literary, philosophical, political, and psychoanalytic panorama on the forever challenging problem of unorthodox sexual habits and practices, traditionally called perversions, even as the world we live in is no longer the one Freud inhabited when he put mankind’s sex life on the map in the closing years of the nineteenth and the opening years of the twentieth centuries. In our twenty-first century, the very notion of perversion is sliding into obsolescence as LGBT, the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender revolution, marches on. Benvenuto argues for retaining the psychiatric-forensic diagnosis of perversion, which calls for some clarifications.
At issue are the varieties of sexual experience in human nature, similar to the varieties of religious experience, to use William James’ felicitous phrase. In animals and humans, sex guarantees procreation, while higher primates and humans also use sex for recreation, as with, for example, bonobo monkeys, which practice masturbation and face-to-face intercourse. But there is a difference, and the difference it makes: that is, from time immemorial, human sexual drives, dreams, and desires have been civilized through language, metaphor, and myth; arts and sciences; communal mores; moral and legal codes and politics; and, last but not least, as seen through the psychoanalytic lens, through Freud’s sexual theories As an omnipotent force in nature and nurture, sex was worshipped in the cults of Aphrodite and Eros and similar divinities in other mythologies. For th