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It is impossible to deny that in their case, a piece of mental work has been performed which, in spite of its horrifying result, is the equivalent of an idealization of the instinct. FREUD (1905).
It is true that the piece of blanket (or whatever it is) is symbolical of some part-object, such as the breast. Nevertheless, the point of it is not its symbolic value so much as its actuality. WINNICOTT (1953).
Freud had at the very beginning of his researches established the fact that it is 'a piece of mental work' that is at the root of perversion-formations. It was to take some half-century and more before psychoanalytic theory could account for the true character and role of this mental work in terms of precocious ego development (cf. James, 1960). Starting from a very different angle, Winnicott (1945), (1960) established the necessity and role of the provided object (maternal) if the psychic fruition of the innate maturational capacities of the infant-child are to actualize. In perversion-formations, the role of these two factors is perhaps more dynamically operative than in any other style of personality integration. In this paper I shall try to elaborate one step further an argument that I have sketched out in my previous papers (Khan, 1962), (1964), (1965a), (1965b), (1968).
The hypothesis I wish to offer here is that during the infant-child stages of a pervert's development, there is a specific quality of maladaptation and/or excessive impingement by the primary (maternal) environment, which is compensated for by a precocious ego capacity of mental work that leads to the creation in the inner psychic reality of a 'collated internal object', which is the pervert's equivalent of what Winnicott (1953) describes as the transitional object in ordinary normal development. This 'collated internal object' the pervert can experience and actualize only through specific sexual events. For this argument it is necessary to establish three basic features of perversions: