Delinquent Acts as Perversions and Fetishes1

Certain delinquent acts can be classed wholly or partly as perversions or fetishisms. Naturally they are more easily identifiable as such when they fall within the area of sexual offences through the nature of the acts themselves and their similarity to the abnormal sexual acts of the non-delinquent.

Freud's early views, like all ground-breaking discoveries, must be subjected to certain modifications to fit in with current findings. In bringing delinquent acts within the framework of perversions his opinions need to be reexamined. This often-quoted statement that 'neuroses are, so to speak, the negative of perversions' must be clarified. This idea is seemingly to be repudiated since sexual and other types of offenders clearly reveal in analysis many neurotic features, marked ego defences, and conflicts that prevent us from thinking of perversions that arise solely from unmodified id impulses. Gillespie2 offers us a convincing explanation of this apparent contradiction by pointing out that Freud went a step beyond his earlier views in later regarding the 'ego as deeply involved in the process of perversion formation'. Gillespie relates the process to the splitting of the ego, 'which is to be found not only in other perversions but in neuroses and psychoses as well'.

Thus we have a rationale for the fact that perversions can dwell side by side with neurotic features. But we are still held up in connecting delinquency with perversions by another of Freud's views which he propounded when discussing looking and touching. As he wrote: 'The desire for looking becomes a perversion (a) when it is exclusively limited to the genitals; (b) when it becomes connected with the overcoming of loathing (voyeurs and onlookers at the functions of excretion); and (c) when instead of preparing for the normal sexual aim it suppresses it.'

There is some ambiguity here as to whether Freud considered that these three points were essential components of every perversion, or that any com